


Zwischen Abgrund und Schein

by lesmisloony



Category: Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Angst, Depression, F/M, Multi, Psychological Horror, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-16
Updated: 2014-09-17
Packaged: 2018-02-17 16:20:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 13
Words: 25,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2315822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lesmisloony/pseuds/lesmisloony
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Not everyone copes with loss as well as Cosette: she opens her heart to a pair of canaries, a strange gentleman, and a girl off the street while Marius does his best to shut himself away. Cosette's strange pet tries to pry him out of his unhealthy mental state with mixed results, and he slowly starts to believe that no one is what they seem. Rated for sex and violence.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Einsam und traurig

I never understood why Cosette didn't tend to her garden, even when we were young–"when we were young," I say, though it has only been a few years. On that night I felt like an old man already. I had only been reunited with my sainted father when he was a corpse, I had seen my closest friend and all of my acquaintances die, I had watched Cosette's father slip out of his body, and now my grandfather was unable to rise from his bed. My aunt was going to go the moment he did, I just knew it, for she had nothing else. I had nothing else but Cosette. No one I worked with knew anything more about me than I had to tell them. I was a professional Marius, Cosette's Marius, and a broken Marius, three people encased in the same skin.

My wife would be forever the darling little girl from the park, even as her stomach grew round and the doctor advised her to lay aside her corsets. She had an eternal fount of energy bubbling up from her soul somehow, giving her that glowing smile and the ability to prance through her old garden even now the way she must have done in the days before our marriage. Her hair was falling from beneath her hat and long strands slipped into her eyes; she blew them carelessly out of the way and continued to move through the overgrown underbrush behind the gate in the Rue Plumet. I suppose she would have been skipping if the bushes and weeds weren't so tangled. I heard her cry out as she broke through a spiderweb, but within a moment she was laughing and humming again.

As for me, I was content to sit on our old stone bench. My old address was still visible scratched into the wall beneath the layers of moss if you knew what to look for. When I sat that night, I moved slowly as though my knees were sore. I wondered why. I was in perfect health; the doctor had told me this after he had looked over Cosette. He said I was like my grandfather, that given the will I should live until I am a hundred. But had I the will? The question had floated in my mind ever since.

We never came here during the day. It wasn't a decision either of us spoke aloud. Somehow we both knew that the evening was our time, that the garden would never be the same in the harsh glare of the sunlight. Instead we sneaked out of the house, Cosette stifling giggles at our wonderful absurdity, and together we hurried to see our old garden beneath the stars again, to watch the glow worms appear in the grass and listen to the crickets, enjoying the feeling that someone might catch as at any moment. On these nights I could easily imagine that I might look up to see a candle flicker to life upstairs, that Toussaint, long moved out after her constant fighting with Nicolette, might throw open a window and I would have to duck into a shadow just in case.

We didn't make the journey often enough. Most nights I was fully ready to sleep before the sun's light had gone from the sky. I tired easily in those days and I saw little reason to stay awake. Cosette told me to get all the sleep that I could then, for when the baby came she thought everything would be different. She promised that everything would change, but that wasn't what I wanted. I hadn't any problem with everything: my problem was with myself. Everything else was perfect.

Unless Cosette thought holding his great-grandchild could somehow cure my grandfather. The doctor had seen him too. It's a matter of will, he had said. The old man was as healthy as ever he was, albeit weaker, of course. It was no coincidence that the illness began within days of the death of his last good friend from those old salons we once visited. The salons were long closed up, the hosts dead. Grandfather was the living end of a dead era, an extinct generation, and somewhere inside him, perhaps a part of him so buried that he was not aware of it, he had decided to join his old friends.

Without Cosette, I wonder if I would have joined mine.

There were several bats in the sky overhead, grey splotches barely visible beneath the dim glow of the stars. The way they were wheeling through the air reminded me of a pack of vultures.

Cosette screamed.

I thought at first that she had encountered another spiderweb and I smiled. She wasn't in my sight anymore, her soft blue gown lost in the thick foliage.

Then she cried out again, and that time it sounded like my name. I pushed myself to my feet almost reluctantly, promising myself that I would find it in me to be angry with her if she was expecting me to crush a roach beneath my shoe or something equally trivial. I could see fireflies hovering just above the bushes and several moths veering away from me as I pushed through the weeds.

But then I started to wonder if something was really wrong with her, for I heard her call my name again. I wondered if she had fallen, if she had hurt the baby, if she had twisted her ankle galloping through tangled foliage like a child. By the time I saw the top of her head behind something that had been covered by a thorny vine I was certain that she was bleeding to death in the grass. My heartbeat was pulsing through my ears as I charged straight towards her.

Once I had trampled the patch of briars I could immediately see what made Cosette call for me.

Some sort of beggar was in our garden. The stench of human filth made me choke for a moment; I wondered how my wife could bear to be so close. Cosette was kneeling at the side of a pile of rags which might have been an old woman or a very small child. Whatever it was, it had a matted mess of dark hair more tangled than the underbrush. One brownish arm was extended, tough knotty skin stretched over bone, and Cosette was grasping its clawed hand in her own pretty gloves. The thing lifted its head so that its hair fell to one side and its glassy eyes, whitened like a pair of marbles, seemed to focus on me. Its face was as ravaged as the arm, almost like a decaying corpse, and as it looked at me its cheeks bunched up and its lips stretched into what could have been a smile. I was amazed to see its teeth, that none of them seemed very yellow. Perhaps the bright coloration was a trick of the thing's dark skin.

I started to address it. I have no idea what I said. I do know I intended to ask it to get out of our garden, to demand it not trespass on our property; I also know that whatever I said, it was not a full sentence. The creature seemed horribly spellbinding and I found myself unable to order my thoughts until I broke eye contact with it and focused instead on my odd little wife. She was still holding the thing's hand. Now she, too, looked up at me.

"We have to help her, Marius," she said, and at the sound of my name the thing made a noise like a cough.

I meant to say that the only way to help it at this point would be to shoot it at close range, to put it down and shorten its suffering. I wanted to say that it was useless, that this was one more old woman dying under the Parisian sky, but this one happened to be in our garden. I wanted to pull Cosette away and tell her that she mustn't be so childish, she mustn't look at the world as though everything was good, because that was the way the world got to you, the way it took advantage of you and tore at you until there was nothing left but a miserable, lonely core. Instead, I said, "How?"

Before I realized what I was doing my wife had me lifting the disgusting thing and carrying it back to our carriage, opening the gate properly instead of slipping through the eternally-loose bar as I had done on the way in. The creature's smell was overpowering. Lifting it was a surprisingly simple matter, though: I suspected that the rags it had been wrapped in weighed far more than it did. I felt that I carried a load of exceedingly dirty laundry in my arms: I hardly even felt the creature's frame inside. It let its head hang limp past my elbow on one side and its knees bend on the other as though it was already dead. I was certain that I was taking this thing out of the garden only so it could die in our house. That would be a lot of trouble, though I imagined I could convince the police that it had sneaked in during the night and we had never seen it before.

In the carriage on the way home Cosette sat at my side and let the thing's head rest in her lap, stroking one hand over its filthy hair and cupping its hollow cheek with the other. I thought the carriage was rattling in a strange way during most of the ride home. It was not until Cosette leaned up and whispered, "Do you hear her?" that I realized the creature lying across our laps was attempting to hum. I even recognized the tune as an old song I had heard before, something that had been sung by one of the people I had known when I felt like a young man.

Cosette knew the words.

_Combien je regrette_

_Mon bras si dodu_

_Ma jambe bien faite_

_Et le temps perdu…_


	2. Wie du mich haben willst

I lifted the creature in my arms and carefully extracted it from the carriage without letting it touch the upholstery. On the way back up to the house Cosette trotted at my side, its claw-like hand still wrapped in hers, but she stopped me at the door. Her eyes were dancing with mischief and she lowered her voice, though there was certainly no one awake to hear her. Basque had stayed behind with the horse.

"She can be ours, Marius. Can she be ours? And only ours?"

I didn't answer. She must have seen that I didn't understand—of course she did; she sees everything. I'm the thick one.

"You mustn't let anyone know! Do you think we can do it? Aunt Gillenormand never leaves Grandfather's side. If we let her stay in the empty room on the far side of ours they wouldn't find out!"

"That's mad, Cosette," I said. "Of course they will find out. What could have given you such a notion?"

She looked back down at the creature, an expression of tenderness slipping across her pretty face, and I realized she was whispering because it, not the household above, had fallen asleep. "They won't understand, Marius. They'll make us put her back out on the streets, and look at her!" I did. It was curled in my arms this time, not limp like before, with its head resting against my shoulder, skinny back rising and falling contentedly beneath the rags. I could see the knobs of its spine at the back of its neck. Cosette was toying with its matted hair. "She needs us, Marius. We can take care of her. We can just help her get cleaned up and back on her feet, you know? Maybe Adélaïde can help me find a job for her. You know her husband has a high position in that workshop."

"Yes, darling, but we can do those without trying to hide it from Aunt Gillenormand. Can you imagine what she would do if she happened upon this thing sleeping in the spare bed? And I doubt Nicolette would be able to keep it a secret for long." Even as I spoke, I saw the loophole through which my wife would be sure to dive.

She didn't disappoint. "Nicolette is away visiting her sister in the south!" There it was. "And I'm sure Basque would never say anything. He doesn't really say much as it is."

She was right. How was she right about this? It was madness, utterly foolish madness, and she knew as well as I did that she was going to get her way. I groaned and the creature shifted against me, pressing its greasy forehead closer to my neck. "But when Aunt Gillenormand sees it and begins to scream and call for the police, it won't be my job to calm her down, do you understand?"

She said "Of course!" and leaned up to kiss my cheek (the one that wasn't buried in the hair of the creature, that is), but I doubted she had listened to a word I had said after she knew she had won me over. She rushed over to the door and opened it slowly, holding it for me as I brought the creature through. We were in the lower room I hated, the one where I had had her receive her poor father so often. Cosette's face seemed aglow in the darkness as she whispered, "We should get this poor thing into bed! You see how exhausted she is."

"No!" I hissed, "Cosette, no! It is not going anywhere near the linens until it's clean, do you understand? And with no Nicolette here, it'll have to bathe itself!"

She was sulking now. I could tell even though the door had closed and the room was in total blackness. Her voice came from somewhere closer to me than I expected. "That's out of the question, Marius; she's too tired. Look at the poor thing!"

"Cosette, it's completely dark in here. I can't."

"I'll bathe her myself, but you have to help me. Here," I felt her take my arm, "come put her down in the tub and I'll tell her what's going on while you fetch some water. Is that alright by you?"

She tugged at my sleeve and I moved obediently. It wasn't alright by me and we both knew it, but we also both knew that I wasn't going to speak up or forbid it. I am Cosette's Marius.


	3. Endlich eine Frau sein

When I depositing the thing into the bath it clung to my neck like a frightened kitten; Cosette had to peel its gnarled hands away from my jacket and my hair in order to detach it from me. I admit I was somewhat disgusted by its behavior and I dropped it in a bit too roughly, but it didn't cry out when its elbow cracked the porcelain edge of the tub. It merely slumped down like a thing already dead, head limp against its chest and shoulders hunched. It remained utterly still but for a little twitch of the skin as we began to fill the tub with water around it. I was almost surprised when a layer of scum didn't immediately float on the surface.

"Right," Cosette said, startling me. I looked up; she was stepping out of her dress. The expression on my face must have belied my confusion, for she cocked an eyebrow and said, "It won't do to get my nice dress all wet, silly," in a tone that almost seemed chiding. "Now, darling, it isn't right for you to stay here. But will you fetch me a decent chemise? One of my old ones will do."

I found one of her old shifts folded at the back of the wardrobe, too narrow for her to wear now, and on my return I attempted to pass it through the door. Unfortunately, I was answered by, "Marius, I'm already on the floor. Please bring it in."

I suppose it was callous of me to forget how uncomfortable her belly must be making her. I had seen her pushing herself slowly out of chairs, and now she had decided to lean over the side of a tub? I opened the door cautiously.

My wife was knelt beside the tub in her underthings, sleeves rolled up past her elbows, hair pinned sloppily in a knot at the back of her head. Shorter pieces had escaped around her face, as always, and the warmth of the nearby bath water had brought a flush to her cheeks. She always looked like a painting.

The thing in the water, however, looked more like something that might have washed up on the banks of the Seine. It took me a few moments to notice that Cosette had managed to free it from its rags, which were bunched up on the floor, far away from the chair where she had carefully left her folded blue dress. The thing's back was so covered in dirt and burned so dark by the sun that I didn't realize I was looking at bare skin until I saw the knobs of its spine curling down between two shoulder blades that were so pronounced they resembled saucers jabbing out from beneath her flesh. I could have counted her ribs if I had had the stomach to keep my eyes on her pathetic frame, half-submerged in water which was already becoming cloudy.

"She won't move, Marius. Can you help me get that on her?"

I was clutching the shift too tightly at this point, but Cosette wasn't watching me. She grabbed the poor little thing by one shoulder and pushed it back, forcing it to sit up partially straight. I was grateful for its long hair, but even with the blanket of tangled curl I was not spared the sight of one of its flat little breasts. Trying not to look anywhere but its terrible back, I ventured closer and jammed the shift over its head.

My fingers tangled briefly with the hair and I thought I felt it lean its head against my touch, but then Cosette asked me to get the arms through while she continued to hold the sad little creature upright. I seized its upper arm–my fingers all but encircled it, the poor thing was so thin–and lifted it, pushing the limp hand through one armhole. To reach the other arm I had to lean across the tub and my chest brushed the bony back. I was quicker with that one, and following Cosette's instructions I seized the skinny waif by its underarms and hauled it to its feet while my wife rolled the chemise down enough to cover her properly.

While holding it up I saw the rest of the pathetic beggar's form, hipbones thrusting out to each side of an impossibly drawn waist, legs so spindly I wondered if they could hold her unaided, all of it angles where I expected none. I could almost see her as a skeleton in a tight brown suit.

I kept my eyes on those terrible legs while Cosette was working and saw then that what I had assumed were further trails of dirt were in fact scars, a myriad of shining streaks of discolored flesh not just on the legs but further up, across the back and along the arms. They were of different lengths and thicknesses–some were so severe that it was obvious crude stitches had been used to sew them together. The most pronounced was a round one in the middle of the back, something like a puncture wound in the ribcage. I wondered if any of the people I had known could have explained these things to me, could have looked over this wretch with a clinical eye and tutted a few times, pointing here and there with a long white finger and telling me that this was a surface abrasion and that must have been done with a knife. I had known a medical student, hadn't I?

I was not going to think on them, none of them. I would not remember them. Not until it didn't make me feel so sick.

When I was ill I don't remember anything, don't remember waking up at all until the day Cosette came to me. They say I was well before I ever saw her, that I was holding conversations with my grandfather and sitting upright, and if that's the case then so be it. I don't remember that and I don't remember the faces of those young men, none of them. I had one friend, but he died. I have Cosette.

"Marius!"

My wife was watching me with her brows drawn together. Had she said something else? I must have seemed worried, for her expression softened and she leaned her head against my leg. "You can let her back down now, darling. Aunt Gillenormand never leaves Grandfather's side, don't worry. They won't know a thing."

I carefully lowered the poor little waif into the water again and left Cosette there with one of her old brushes and a bar of rough soap. The hall was dark, so I lit a candle once I reached our room and I changed into my nightshirt by its dim, fluttery light.

Unfortunately, the dim light was enough to wake my wife's birds. They were two noisy little yellow things which she had had me buy her a little over a month ago. Ever since she found out she would be a mother, Cosette has been anxious to practice in any way she can. It had begun with a houseplant, a rose which had been miserable in the confines of its clay pot and had turned brown and brittle, though according to Nicolette it still miraculously seemed to be clinging to life. When the biggest flowers had fallen from the plant my wife had begun to pester me about the yellow birds. Unfortunately I was the one who wound up poking bits of bread into their gilded cage each morning. The obnoxious things rewarded me by pecking at my fingers. Now, to silence them, I threw a blanket over their cage. The vendor had explained that the birds always remained quiet when they thought it was night time. Needless to say, the cage was rarely uncovered.

But in watching the hungry creatures hop about on their perches I thought suddenly of the waif girl. Cosette was helping the poor thing get clean enough to retain the appearance of a human being, but had anyone thought to bring the beggar food?

I pulled on a housecoat and hurried down to the pantry, taking the candle with me and shielding the flame with a cupped hand.

Nicolette had been good enough to leave us with all our shelves well-stocked before her vacation, though I think she assumed we would dine at restaurants for all our dinners. I didn't go to many cafés, not if I had a choice. I didn't like the atmosphere, the way everyone seemed to be waiting for something as they nursed their glasses. I hated staircases and billiards tables and I hated those columns that supported the upper stories almost as much as I hated the long tables before the hearths. Something about them made me unhappy, made me remember unhappiness. I much preferred to eat at our dinner table.

As I looked over all the fruits and bread and covered dishes Nicolette had left out, I remember hearing somewhere that a starving person can eat too much and must be slowly introduced to food again. I knew there was a reason, like they would become sick or their stomachs would swell too much and they would die, but even without that it made sense. I took one red apple into my hand and stared at it for a while before tucking it into my other arm and grabbing one of our oranges as well. I wondered if the waif would have the strength to break through its skin, so I took the liberty of picking a tiny hole in the top of it while I hurried back up the stairs.

I forgot to knock but Cosette did not seem startled at my return; she merely smiled up at me from the floor. She had turned her charge around so that the head was drooping over the side of the tub and was slowly working the brush and comb through little bits of hair at a time. I could see the part that she had finished, straight though still a bit frizzled and separate from the dirty mass of the rest, and I saw a hairball gathering on the floor where my wife was obviously leaving everything that was ripped from the poor thing's head in this attempt to make it look presentable.

Without waiting for further acknowledgment from Cosette I went to the side of the tub and I looked at the beggar. Those glassy eyes were half-closed now and the entire face was expressionless, completely blank like a dead person but without the serenity. I held the apple out first to see if I could get a response.

In a move so sudden it startled me the odd little thing snatched the fruit out of my hand and began to eat like a wild animal, turning the apple against the mouth while guarding it with both hands. I noticed the eyes had already traveled to the orange which was in the crook of my elbow, so I held it out as well. The apple core dropped into the water and bobbed there while those nimble, claw-like fingers plucked at the orange peel and, in fat yellow chunks, dropped it carelessly into the bath as well. The food was gone more quickly than I expected, but then my wife's wretched little ward went back to that lifeless pose as though nothing had transpired.

I glanced at Cosette, who was smiling knowingly to herself as she continued to pick out the knots in the creature's hair, then back at the girl in the tub.

My eyes met hers, dull as marbles, and she drew back one cheek into a genuine expression like a smile.

I looked away at once, wondering what on earth could have prompted my cheeks to burn so inconveniently. I kissed the top of my wife's head and left the room.


	4. Eine Stimme hören

The yellow birds were what woke me the next morning. I noted with some surprise that Cosette had fed them in the night; in doing so she had left the sheet off the cage and they had begun their racket as soon as sunlight filtered into the room from beneath the heavy curtains.

My wife was still asleep, lying on her side with one arm curled under her belly and the other draped across my chest. I had heard her shuffling the waif girl into the spare room, listened to the low hum of her voice as she talked to the insensible thing, and when she had come to bed at last I had feigned sleep. I heard her change out of her clothes and felt the mattress dip as she joined me. She had kissed my cheek once, then again, obviously hoping to wake me. I was tired, so tired, but then she had put one leg across my stomach and perched there, lips at my forehead, unrelenting. I had sighed and opened one eye.

She hardly needed me at all. I had run my fingers across the smooth mound of her stomach, as heartened by the faint movements of the baby as I was by the brush of Cosette's lips on my skin, and I let her do what she pleased. My wife was beautiful in any condition. She had been angry at me once, had even raised her voice right there in the cemetery, and for days she had turned away from me when I came into the room. She had been beautiful then, the stony shoulder and the long neck of an impassive Grecian statue. I think it was then that I had realized that I was alone, that Cosette was the only friend I had. I spent hours in both cemeteries, mourned both men and a dozen more whose bodies I had never found. I took the letter from Cosette's father then and read over the story that had already been burned into my memory, because she was all he had had, one shining comfort in a long, strange lifetime. In fact, there had always been someone living with nothing but Cosette to keep him alive. When I came home that day I gave her back the letter. I had prepared a grand apology about how I needed my angel to live, that without her I would die, but she had flung herself into my arms at once and told me that it was too lonely when I didn't speak to her and that I mustn't blame myself, that it wasn't my fault, cutting me off before I began. I disagreed with her, but I didn't tell her that. I stopped telling her any of those things after that day.

And now she was beautiful in sleep, of course. Her lips were parted and her eyelashes rested gently against her cheeks. The long pieces of hair that framed her face had escaped from her nightcap. Some curled across the pillow and others had fallen over her forehead and against her neck. I lifted her arm off of my chest and placed it gently on the bed, sliding out from beneath the blankets and standing slowly. I had left my housecoat over the back of the chair by her desk; I tied it on over my nightshirt and went to throw the blanket over the birds' cage. I pulled the curtains back and secured them. Cosette loved to wake bathed in sunlight each morning. She loved the murmur of voices in the streets below and the sounds of the busy city. I looked out the window as I fumbled with the tie. It was too early for most, but I did spy one tall, well-dressed man leaning against a streetlamp. He seemed to be waiting for something. I had behaved the same way when I was younger, loitering uncomfortably until my slow-moving friend was ready to walk towards the university.

The house was still, though I knew my aunt and grandfather were probably awake already. The older they grew, the earlier they woke. I remembered my grandfather receiving visitors in the evening only a matter of years ago: now anyone coming to the house later than teatime would find him asleep. I think we both knew it didn't matter, though: there was no one left to visit him.

I took some plain bread for my breakfast, and then I thought to bring some to Cosette's waif girl. She had been ravenous the night before, so I tucked half of a loaf beneath my arm and picked up a bit of cheese as well, thinking to give her plain foods until her stomach was ready for something more interesting.

Hers was the empty room next to ours, the room nearest the stairs. I pushed the door open with my elbow and went in, met by complete darkness. The hall had a dim glow to it from the open window in my room, so after a moment I could just see well enough to leave the food on the bedside table. It was warm in there–stuffy even. I looked toward the window, thinking to let in some air, and then I saw that the bed was empty, sheets pulled off to one side, pillows missing. Had the beggar girl stolen our bedsheets and left? I was surprised she had the strength.

But when I rounded the bed I found the sad little creature asleep on the floor, wrapped in our sheets with a pillow beneath her head. Perhaps she had fallen in the night and been too weak to climb back up? Or, I thought, what if the bed was too soft for her? What if, sleeping on streets for who knows how long, she was uncomfortable on a real mattress?

I rather liked that theory. It wasn't as though either of us was going to ask her. I wondered if the poor thing even understood Cosette when she talked to her. She had known enough to hum a bit of that song last night, but I had heard no sound from her since.

I went to the window and peeped out through the curtains, pushing it open enough to let in a bit of a breeze. A couple with two children and a dog were passing through the street, a fine carriage was stopped and a well-dressed woman was being helped out, and the gentleman was still leaning against his lamppost. I realized I didn't know any of our neighbors and wondered which was keeping this poor man waiting. I wondered if the fine gentlewoman lived here or was visiting. Cosette went out sometimes to visit people, but I was usually able to pretend I was engrossed in my studies and she would have Basque escort her. I supposed she had yet to learn that surrounding yourself with friends can only bring you pain in the end. If you let them have access to your soul, if your well-being is affected by theirs, you are giving them a means to torment you and ruin you.

I pushed the curtain aside and heard a noise from behind me. I turned.

The waif rose from the twisted sheets like a spirit from the grave, her hair tied up in rags and one of Cosette's old nightgowns hanging from her bony frame the way it would have hung from a coat rack. Those glassy eyes, grey in the sunlight from the window behind me, seemed to search the room nearsightedly until they settled on me. I knew from her expression that she could not make out my features in the darkness, that she did not recognize me or know who I was, and all at once she threw herself back onto the bed and began to scream, covering her head with her arms.

I did not know what to do. Her voice was terrible, low and rasping and hoarse, cries more like those of a dying man than of a young girl, a husky, burbling swirl of noise like nothing I had ever heard before. In a panic and turned and slammed the window closed and pulled the curtains, noting that the well-dressed woman and the family were gone and only the young man remained, standing in the middle of the street now and facing my house. I hoped he would not call for the police as I fled the spare room.

My aunt was shouting my name. The girl fell silent at last as I hurried toward Grandfather's room, reaching the door just as she opened it, both of us out of breath. "Marius!" she said, her poor old face drawn in terror. "What on earth–"

"It was me!"

Cosette was in the hall behind me, still in nothing but her nightclothes. She had one hand over her stomach.

"I'm so sorry, aunt!" she cried, brushing past me and throwing her arms around the old woman's neck. "I had a nightmare and then I awoke and thought the baby was coming. It's all over now; there's nothing to worry about, but that was terrible of me to let myself frighten you. Can you ever forgive me?" she asked sweetly.

Aunt Gillenormand had come to love my wife. She returned Cosette's smile and kissed her forehead. "Of course, my dear," she said. "I shall explain it to my father." She excused herself and closed the door, eager to be at Grandfather's side again.

The moment we were alone Cosette turned to me, expression very serious. "It was Catherine, wasn't it? What did you do to her, Marius? Is she alright?"

"I– I opened the window, that was all. I startled her."

"Oh, darling, you really must be more careful of her," Cosette chided. She patted my chest. "You will apologize to her, won't you?"

"I–? I mean… yes."

Cosette smiled and leaned up on her toes, kissing my cheek briefly. "Her name is Catherine. Now, I'm off to get dressed. Will you join me for breakfast in an hour or so? I'm famished."

I nodded and watched my wife go into our room and close the door against me. The waif's door was just beyond, still partially ajar. I moved toward it, wishing the entire time that I could just walk past, that I could hurry back to our room or back to the night before and never take Cosette to our garden. Something about the girl was tormenting me. Something about the way she watched me made it seem like she knew too much, like she saw too much of me and was judging me for my behavior. I hated to be near her.

When I went into the room—cautiously, as though she would be waiting to leap upon me and begin that terrible howling again—the girl was standing there in the middle of the floor. When she saw me she lurched forward and I couldn't stop myself jumping away. Her bony arms stretched toward me like the branches of a dying tree in a nightmare, her strange face imploring. Her lips moved, silently at first, but then I realized she was speaking. I could hear her, words formed in the voice of an old drunk, the same voice that had been screeching moments ago.

"Forgive me," she was saying. "You must forgive me. Forgive me. Monsieur Marius."

I fled again, pulling the door firmly shut and taking the stairs two at a time.

So she could speak!

When I reached the front hall, there was a letter on the rug that must have been pushed through the door within the last hour or so. It was addressed to me. As I was pulling the envelope open, tearing it—were my hands really shaking?—I let myself hope that it was someone looking for this girl, someone who knew we had her and wanted her back like a lost pet. She should not be my responsibility. I never wanted a beggar or birds or a stupid rose in a stupid clay vase.

But the letter had nothing to do with the girl.

_My dear M. Marius,_

_Perhaps you remember me. I was a friend of your late friend M. Joly, who died some years ago. It has taken me all this time to learn you lived and that you knew him. I would like very much to visit with you, to speak of old times. I will be in Paris this summer and want to meet you. Please send me word. I will be in the city. The man who bears this letter will give me your message._

_Yours, M. de Lotbinière_

The letter crumpled. I had crumpled the letter in my hand. I packed it harder, packed it into a tight ball of parchment. I opened the door to give my response to the man, to throw it into the man's face, but there was no one there. I went outside. The street was completely empty.


	5. Ein Meer von Gefühl und kein Land

I spent the rest of the day in my study, staring at pages of books without really reading a word. Around noon Cosette knocked and asked if I was coming down to eat with her, but I answered through the door that I was in the middle of a case and nearing a breakthrough. She did not bother me again until the evening, when she said she was going to the theater with Delphine Bélier and her family. For a moment I was panicked, thinking she had repeated that name on the letter. I leapt from my chair and crossed the study in a few strides, yanking the door open to face her and demand she say that again. Cosette had smiled; she knew better than to take me seriously. She reminded me of her friend Madame Bélier, a sweet little creature with a longish face whose husband clung to an old family title of duke that was not stamped out (or lobbed off) during the revolution. She told me that she and Delphine were meeting one of Delphine's cousins from the country and the three of them would be attending the theater along with the duke himself. She implored me to make sure nothing happened to her Catherine while she was gone.

Cosette left in the Bélier carriage and I passed the job of caring for the waif off to Basque. The poor creature had spent most of the afternoon asleep, though I knew Cosette had been fussing over her for an hour or so before lunch. I went back to my study to stare at those books which may as well have been written in Russian for all the good they were doing me. It hardly mattered—I hadn't had a case in a long time.

The letter was crumpled in its little ball at the top of my desk. Why had I not thrown it away? I ignored it and avoided it as though it were a hot coal, turning instead to one of my books, but instead of law I found myself reading names where they were not written, names that I hadn't let into my mind in such a long time.

I snatched up the letter and I unfolded it, smoothing it on the corner of my desk, and I scanned its contents again. The handwriting was very careful and the shade of the ink changed a few times as though it had been written in several sittings despite its brevity. It changed once in the middle of a word. I squinted at it. A friend of M. Joly, it said. A friend of my friend M. Joly, my late friend M. Joly. Had I even known which of them was M. Joly when I watched them dying in front of me? He was the littlest one, wasn't he? The poet whose hair fell into his eyes—no, no that had been someone else. Joly soared on the four wings, that was Joly! He had been small too, the sickly one, the one who had called me "Barius" from behind a red nose! Joly. Joly was dead. I had not seen him fall, not Joly, but he was as dead as all the others. As dead as Combeferre the grave one or that poorly-dressed little poet—Prouvaire, his name had been Prouvaire. My friend, that was what the letter said, my late friend, but I hadn't even known their full names. Prouvaire had been the first to die.

I crumpled the letter again and turned to fling it across the room, fling it and hope I could rid myself of those voices and the echo of shots sounding in my mind the same way, that I could fling them and look away from them and be done with it. No one had had something like this happen—Cosette had never watched people die, not people her own age being murdered. She had lost her father the way I was losing my grandfather; she had lost her mother the way I lost my father. She had never seen people slaughtered like that, cut down right in front of her and blood seeping down into the dirt and those gnarled hands clutching at the front of your shirt while the girl rests her head on your knee—

"Who's that from, Monsieur Marius?"

The rough voice came from somewhere just behind me. I was so startled I sprang to my feet, letter bunched in my suddenly-sweaty palm.

The waif was in the room. She had come in sometime while I had been staring at the books without reading them or while I had been studying the letter, and she had settled herself on the back of the sofa, her bare feet on the cushion.

Cosette had made an effort to dress her, but by putting her in such clothes the things which kept her from being a lady were only accented. She was in a pink dress with a long narrow bodice that revealed her knobby shoulders, large sleeves making her wrists look even more fragile. I imagined the skirts must have been voluminous, but the girl was sitting with them bunched in her lap, revealing her brown knees as sharp as letter openers and her rough, reddened feet. Her hair was done up into a simple knot at her crown, small bunches of ringlets gathered over each ear. It held the curl rather well—better than Cosette's, even, which by the end of the day usually collapsed into long strands like the ears of a spaniel—but the waif's was brittle and damaged looking, frizzing away from the careful ringlets and making her look a bit disheveled despite my wife's obvious efforts.

She was leering at me. The look could only be called a leer, her cracked lips drawn back in a grin that seemed to know too much, seemed to pierce my thoughts, fishy eyes fastened to me with some kind of sick glee. "I scared you, did I?" she was saying. "Well, serves you right for sneaking about while I was sleeping this morning, doesn't it, Monsieur Marius? We're even, aren't we, one to one. Now we can start in the same place. We can start over again like we never scared each other at all. We can start like strangers and meet for the first time."

I didn't know what to say to her, didn't know how to react, so I simply cleared my throat and sat back down, rolling the crumpled letter in my damp palm. "Quite."

"'Quite'?" she repeated, her voice cracking into some kind of shriek . I couldn't tell if I had horrified her or if she was mocking me. But then she fell silent and her face became serious, deep lines appearing at the corners of her mouth. "You shouldn't be like this."

Again, I didn't know how to answer. I think I might have nodded. I do know I unfolded the letter again and spread it against the desk. My sweaty hands had smudged the ink in a few places, but it was still legible.

All at once the girl was on her feet and standing at my side. She was too close for me to look up into her face, so instead I kept my gaze down on the desk, watching her hands from the corner of my vision. She seemed to be reading my letter, so I folded it carefully as I could and smoothed it again, slipping it beneath a book. It was a silly precaution since the beggar girl had almost certainly never been taught to read, much less to decipher a smudged, crumpled piece of parchment.

The moment the letter was gone one of her hands closed over my shoulder, fingers like talons. I looked up and regretted it at once: she was leaning over me, leering still, and now I was staring right into her glassy grey eyes. She was much too close, her hot breath ghosting over my face.

With her free hand she touched my cheek, fingertips brushing my skin and traveling to my hair. It was horrifying and wrong and all I could think was that I wanted her to let go of me, wanted her to move away and leave me with my books and the damned letter. I couldn't keep myself from shuddering, and for some reason this made her stretch her lips back into that terrible smile.

"What you should do now, Monsieur Marius, is push me away. Kick me out and tell me to get off! That's what you should do. That's what you would have done. Isn't it?"

Was her face moving closer? Yes, I should have thrown her off, but I couldn't help but think that that was rude—rude! Manners, at a time like this? My wife gone and this wretch was inexcusably close to me, this creature who had been covered in her own filth the night before, and now–? All it would take was a great shake, or to lift my arm and pluck her little claw away from my shoulder, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. Manners! It was horrid!

And then, blessed salvation, I heard Basque knocking at the door of my study. The girl was away from me in a second, perched on the back of the sofa again like a wild thing, and I practically dove for the door and for my escape.

Unfortunately, I was met not with escape but with a card printed in the same careful script as the letter I had left behind on my desk. Even Basque seemed a little confused as he said, "A visitor, monsieur le baron, waiting for you downstairs."


	6. Die Ewigkeit beginnt heut Nacht

The man in the foyer was not what I expected.

I turned over his card in my hand and his letter in my mind as I went downstairs and pulled the door open. The visitor was standing with his back to me, presumably in order to present himself more dramatically, though when I'd seen that little manoeuvre performed in the past the guest had always found something on which he could pretend to focus his attention. This man was simply facing a bare stretch of wall—one of the few bare parts of the room, in fact. I cleared my throat as though I thought he was not aware of my presence.

His dramatic turn was even more graceful than I would have expected; I had to pause for a moment to take in what I saw. This fellow, de Lotbinière, was wearing a tight-fitting purple jacket over a heavily-embroidered green waistcoat and a gaudy pair of plaid trousers. A silk cravat was knotted meticulously at his neck. His black hair was impeccably curled and arranged like a fashion plate with the part at the side of his head and the long waves hugging his sharp cheekbones. He was perfectly pale and had cunning black eyes. There was a silver-tipped cane in his left hand; he was holding the right one out to me. "Pontmercy?"

"Yes," I said, my voice almost cracking. "Monsieur de Lotbinière. Welcome." I shook his hand. "I must confess that after your letter I did not expect you so soon."

"Rude of me, wasn't it?" he said, flashing a set of alarmingly perfect teeth as he grinned. "Terribly sorry, really I am. I'm afraid I've never been too good at planning ahead."

I nodded. My surprisingly foppish visitor was very charming. I had expected a tragic expression and hushed tones that would immediately invoke those names I had ignored for so long, but this stranger seemed completely recovered from the loss of his close friends. Then again, he wasn't there when it happened. He didn't see the monstrous barricade in the hazy light of that awful morning... I heard gunfire and shouts in a distant part of my mind, but just as I could have sworn I smelled the blood again my visitor cleared his throat, quieting the memories.

"Yes," I said again. "Yes, I am sorry. Sorry, monsieur. I was just thinking—but never mind that. You—ah—you must stay for dinner, monsieur. Our housekeeper is visiting relatives but the cook is here in the evenings. I'm afraid it won't be as nice as—"

"Your housekeeper?" he cut in, voice sharp.

"Monsieur?"

I thought I sensed impatience for a moment, but it passed and he continued. "I am in a most embarrassing situation, Monsieur le baron. Monsieur, in all honesty I must admit to you that I haven't come to you to reminisce. I must admit, monsieur, that I have no home in Paris anymore and, as of that one rather terrible day, no friends upon whom I may call." Tucking his cane against his chest he bowed low, his pomaded hair hardly moving as he did so. "Monsieur," he said again, "monsieur Pontmercy, I'm afraid I must beg to impose upon you for one night. I would be most happy to sleep in the room your housekeeper has left empty, monsieur, if you will permit it, and I shall clean up after myself so that you would never know I had been there."

The floorboards creaked behind me; I turned to see Cosette's beggar standing at my back. She had been watching de Lotbinière over my shoulder with an expression in her eyes that I couldn't quite interpret. I quickly looked back to my visitor, anxious to avoid her gaze.

De Lotbinière was still stooped, eyes on the floor. I bit my lip before answering in the only way that I could: "Monsieur, I gladly invite you to stay here tonight. We can put you up in a spare room, a proper room, and it won't be any trouble. My dear wife is always glad to open our doors to anyone who needs it." Without much discrimination, I added, but I didn't dare say the words aloud.

"Your wife?" he said, looking up at me, but then he seemed to hear what I had told him and he clasped his empty hand to his heart, bowing again and righting himself. "You have my eternal gratitude, monsieur," he said humbly. "I swore to myself that I would visit Paris again only on the anniversary of the birthday of our late friend Monsieur Joly."

"Is it his birthday?" I asked, hoping to sound disinterested enough to discourage this vein of conversation.

Then, to my horror, I felt the beggar girl's hand on my shoulder. "Who is it, Monsieur Marius?" she rasped.

I stepped quickly to the side and succeeded in shaking her off, but once I had moved de Lotbinière saw the girl, the pathetic little thing with skin burned by the sun. She was barefoot, broken toenails peeking out from beneath the padded pink hem of my wife's fine dress. As my guest eyed her, his brows drawn together, I thought I saw the corners of his mouth tighten as though he was attempting to swallow a laugh. I could hardly blame him such a reaction.

There was a long pause and I realized he was waiting for me to introduce him to the girl. I cleared my throat, suddenly aware I didn't actually know either of their names. "This, ah, monsieur, this is a friend of my wife's—ah—Mademoiselle Catherine… ahem. And mademoiselle, this is—ah, I'm so sorry, monsieur, I'm afraid I don't know your first name. This is Monsieur de Lotbinière."

The girl smirked a little and nodded at the visitor, who bowed again in return. "It's Guillaume," he said, both to the waif and to me. "Guillaume de Lotbinière."

"Thank you," I mumbled.

"But may I ask, monsieur, if it isn't too rude: where is your wife? She is not ill, I hope?"

"Oh, no. She went with Monsieur le duc Bélier to the opera. She may be home before we eat."

De Lotbinière narrowed his eyes for a moment in thought and I realized the implications of what I had just said.

"She is close to his wife, the duchess. The Béliers are joined by a relative from the country tonight, I believe," I added quickly.

His expression didn't change. "I do hope to meet her."

"Shall I show you to your room?"

De Lotbinière bowed again and retrieved a case and a top hat from a nearby table. When I turned I noticed that Catherine had disappeared and I worried at how quietly she was able to move in that puff of a dress.

"How did your wife meet the duke, if I may ask?" de Lotbinière asked conversationally.

I started to answer, but I realized I didn't know. "Through a mutual friend," I lied. I would ask Cosette when she came home.

The room that we had set aside to become the nursery was directly across the hall from our room. It would have been Monsieur Jean's room had he allowed himself to live with us. The room next to it was my aunt's. Though she never slept in her bed anymore, preferring the chair at grandfather's bedside, I didn't take the risk of putting Monsieur de Lotbinière in her much nicer room. I didn't even want to imagine the fuss she would make if she found a stranger in her bed—especially a strange man. "This is the nursery," I said apologetically, pushing the door open and gesturing to the narrow bed inside. "It isn't in use yet, but I imagine it won't be more than a month or two until we'll have need of it."

"My congratulations," said de Lotbinière. He left his case at the foot of the wardrobe and his hat and cane on the rocking chair. "It's a delightful room. Thank you again for your hospitality on such short notice."

"I would have offered the spare room, but I'm afraid Mademoiselle Catherine arrived only a night before you did," I said, glancing back into the hall to be sure the waif hadn't crept up behind me again.

"Though I can't help but wonder," de Lotbinière mused, "if it's a good idea for Madame la baronne to go out in a condition such as hers. She must really want to see this duke."

"Duchess," I corrected. Was Cosette's behavior really so unseemly? De Lotbinière apparently thought it appropriate to broach such a topic—was it that dire? "My wife is quite capable of taking care of herself, monsieur, though I thank you for your concern. As for her reputation, I daresay she understands societal etiquette better than I could pretend to. I leave you to your room. I will notify you when dinner is ready. I'm very sorry I take it so late."

I pulled the door closed behind him and went back into my own room, poking a bit of food into the birdcage and conveying some water from the basin to the old dried-up rose. When I had finished I went to the window and pushed the curtains to one side. Cosette was not back yet. I checked my pocket watch. Was the duke Bélier really that much better company than her own husband?

I don't know how long I remained at the window, but I did not move, consumed by worry and frustration at my wife's behavior, until I finally recognized the Bélier carriage at the end of the road.


	7. Sei bereit

De Lotbinière had not addressed me once since we took our seats at the table. With Nicolette's absence and Cosette's condition it was I who served the reheated food, a rough meal Basque had cobbled together from supplies our cook had set aside. If we were going to continue entertaining these guests, we would have no choice but to find a temporary worker to take charge of the kitchens.

Catherine didn't mind the crude meal, of course: she was eating with her bare hands like a wild thing, cupping the food against her mouth as she had done that evening I had brought her fruit in the bath. She glanced at me over her bony fingers and I had to look away from the glint in her eyes.

Even de Lotbinière seemed to be enjoying the food, pausing between bites to laugh graciously at the plot of the opera Cosette was describing and dabbing repeatedly at his red lips with a napkin draped over two fingers. I saw him take extra helpings twice.

Two hours ago Cosette, her cheeks still flushed from her excursion, had gone straight to check on Catherine after arriving home. I did not see her again until dinner was on the table and Basque was taking a tray to my aunt and grandfather. She had come into the room with her hand in Catherine's and only released her to curtsy when I introduced de Lotbinière. When I had said we shared a mutual friend I had not missed the quirk of her eyebrow as she looked back and forth between us. Of course the word would surprise her. I hadn't left the house for anything but work since her father's death.

The story Cosette was telling seemed frivolous. I couldn't bring myself to listen to it, but I couldn't focus on anything else either. The potato was gritty and tasteless in my mouth. I didn't want to swallow.

Catherine was still watching me when I looked up again, licking her fingers unapologetically. I wondered why de Lotbinière had not questioned her manners, but I realized he hadn't taken his eyes off Cosette since she had entered the room. Thank goodness he was keeping her too entertained to notice my mood.

Basque collected the dishes clumsily, apologizing for the quality of the meal when he saw that my plate was almost full. I excused him and bid the company good night. Cosette begged me to stay up and talk with our guests, but I felt as though I was surrounded by a haze that could not be penetrated by voices. Even the chattering yellow birds could not keep me from falling asleep the moment I was in bed.

Cosette's face was inches from mine when I awoke, one arm curled under the pillow and the other around her stomach. I slipped carefully out from under the blankets, threw on my housecoat and slippers, and went down the hall to visit my grandfather.

I paused outside the door and listened, prepared to continue on to my study if I heard snores, and to my surprise I heard a low, earnest voice. It was my grandfather himself who bade me enter when I knocked.

What I found in that room shocked me. Yesterday morning the sight of him had driven me to call for the doctor again: his skin had been gray and loose, gathered and pinched at his neck like the head of an old turtle emerging from a shell of quilts. His cloudy eyes had blinked open once when I entered, but after that he seemed to sink back into a silent sleep, air rattling in and out of his gaping mouth. My old aunt spent most of the day crying, saying that she would bury her father before the week was out. I had gone over my finances to be sure to have enough for the funeral arrangements.

The sound of conversation had surprised me, but it was the sight of Catherine in my aunt's chair, leaning over the side of the bed with a conspiratorial smile on her face, that astounded me. I was on the verge of physically throwing the wretched girl out of the room when I heard my grandfather's voice—not the wheezing syllables to which my family had grown accustomed, but his actual voice—call my name.

Grandfather was propped up with extra pillows, almost sitting, and his bowl of soup was already empty on the tray in his lap. His eyes glittered mischievously from their hollow sockets as though the light in them had never gone out. "Marius, you foolish boy, why ever didn't you introduce me to your wife's clever friend?"

I gripped the bedpost for support at the sight of him. "Grandfather!"

"You think just because I'm an old man I can offer pretty young things no company, is that it? And you lock me in here day and night with only Berthe to entertain me? You're as thoughtless as your father!"

Now I recoiled, his words stinging now more than they ever had in my youth, and my grandfather's expression softened. He lifted a wobbly hand from his blankets. "Come here, my son, sit by me."

I obeyed automatically, sitting on the very edge of the mattress and taking his bony hand in mine. He grasped at my fingers with more strength than I expected.

"You must indulge me, my boy, even when I am a fool. Do you know that?"

I nodded.

"This little devil of yours tells me that you've a friend visiting as well. Someone you knew before you fell ill."

"He- he knew an acquaintance of mine," I said quickly.

My grandfather covered our intertwined hands with his free one. "You told me once that you had only one friend in all the world."

"He died," I said flatly.

"I know. I know." Grandfather patted my hand. I sneaked a glance at Catherine from the corner of my eye; to my relief she was sitting very still and inspecting her nails, giving off an air of someone who wasn't listening. I would have never expected such consideration from such a creature as she! "And this visitor of yours, is he bothering you with all that—unpleasantness?"

I shook my head.

Grandfather patted my hand again, a slow, rhythmic motion. I didn't know what else to say, so he allowed us to slip into a long stretch of silence. It wasn't until Catherine shifted in her chair that his countenance brightened. "This charming young lady has decreed that when I am well enough, she will escort me to the park and let me walk with my arm in hers!"

I glanced quickly up at Catherine, wondering what it was that my grandfather found so charming. Less than a week ago she had been a twisted wraith wrapped in filth-soaked rags: had Cosette managed to erase such a past so quickly?

I still saw the wild creature from the garden when I studied her, but with her hair arranged and the dirt scrubbed away from her sunburnt skin she looked more like a frail refugee or a peasant in ladies' clothing at the very least. With continued regular meals and baths, perhaps she wouldn't turn heads if Grandfather went outdoors with her. "I am glad for you," I murmured.

"Alright, be off with you, you rascal!" he said lightly, squeezing my hand once more and then releasing me. "Off to your books, you lawyer! And if you see my daughter, tell her to get some fresh air for a change! Mademoiselle Catherine is attending to me today!"

I did as he said, stopping by my aunt's room only to find her fast asleep, perhaps sleeping in a bed rather than that chair for the first time in weeks. I was content to leave her be and close myself away for the rest of the morning.

When I finished the lunch that Basque brought me, I decided to shake off my studies with a quick turn around the house to see how the day was progressing. From outside my grandfather's door I heard the low hum of Catherine's voice, but no individual words came to me. Across the hall, my aunt was still asleep. The nursery door was ajar; I found de Lotbinière in the salon, leaning over Cosette's chair to point at some detail of her needlework. I cleared my throat and he snapped to attention. "Ah! Pontmercy!" he said smoothly. "I was just commenting on your lovely wife's fabulous handiwork. She tells me that she is counting on giving you a son."

I cleared my throat again, unsure what to say. "Indeed."

"Marius, darling, did you know that Monsieur de Lotbinière has been to Canada? He has been telling me all about his travels!"

"Yes, quite," de Lotbinière said. "One can never see enough of the world, that's what I always say. Have you traveled much, Pontmercy?"

I shook my head.

"His father was a soldier!" offered Cosette. "He must have seen the world in Napoleon's army."

"A soldier? Incredible! Like father, like son, eh Pontmercy?"

I did not answer.

"Oh, Marius! I forgot to tell you: Marguerite-Anne has invited me to see the new comedy tonight. Would you like to come? Please?"

"Cosette, I have so much work—"

"Oh, Marius, you haven't been out in ages!" she pouted. "I had her reserve an extra seat so we could both go! I'm sure you'll love it. Do come, Marius."

"Really, there's no way I could," I insisted.

De Lotbinière put a hand on my wife's arm. "Madame Pontmercy, would it be rude of me to—? I mean, I've only just arrived in Paris and have never been to the theater here. If your friend has reserved an extra ticket, and if it's alright with Pontmercy, perhaps I could tag along?"

Cosette gasped. "Oh, how happy I would be to bring company! Marius, do you mind if Monsieur—"

"Someone might as well take it," I interrupted impatiently. "Go ahead."

Back in the sanctuary of my study, I fell unceremoniously into an armchair. When had Cosette's energy become so exhausting? I leaned my head back and closed my eyes, draping an arm over my brow to block out the daylight.

My own even breathing must have lulled me to sleep, for when I pulled my arm away and blinked the room into focus I was jolted back into awareness by the sight of Catherine. She was still wearing the pink dress but was seated normally this time on the divan, the feet protruding from beneath the hem of her borrowed dress clothed in fresh stockings. Perhaps Cosette's teachings were slowly taking root.

"How- how is my grandfather?" I asked politely, choosing not to comment on the fact that she had been watching me sleep.

She ignored the question, piercing me with that unforgiving stare of hers. "What was your friend's name?" she asked bluntly.

"What friend?"

"The only friend you had. What was his name?"

"I don't remember."

"Must not have been a good friend, then."

I ground my teeth but said nothing.

"D'you think there's a heaven, Monsieur Marius? D'you think the only friend you ever had is listening to you right now? How must it feel, I wonder, to die and be forgotten by someone you loved?"

"I didn't forget him."

"Then what was his name?"

"I don't remember."

"You forgot him. Liar!" she snarled. Her hands were balled into fists. "Someone loves you, someone dies for you, and you can't even be bothered to remember their name?" Now she was on her feet, approaching me.

"Courfeyrac didn't die for _me_!" I shouted back, pushing myself out of my chair and leaning into her uncomprehending face. It was taking all of my energy not to seize her fragile neck and wring it in my hands; I could hardly even hear my voice over the rush of blood in my ears. "I didn't have anything to do with it! I shouldn't have even been there! I didn't believe what they believed, and look where it got us all! I was there because I wanted to die; they were there because they cared about life!"

To my shock, her rage melted away in an instant. "So you did want to die," she said quietly, almost as if this satisfied her. "Do you still?"

My mouth dropped open to answer, but I couldn't find any words.

She laughed out loud then, an unearthly sound, seized the lapels of my housecoat, and kissed me on the cheek.


	8. Vergessen die Zeit

In the week that followed, the household fell into a routine around me. Catherine spent the mornings keeping my grandfather company; in a matter of days he was able to take short walks around his room. De Lotbinière stuck to Cosette like a shadow, luckily providing enough distraction for her that she did not notice how deteriorated my patience with conversation had become. Each time I opened a new book I felt myself plunge into a deep pool where the only sounds were my thoughts and the water pressing at my ears. I let the stories distort the voices of the family that surrounded me into nonsense.

Aunt Gillenormand, relieved of her nursing duties by Catherine, had fallen into the unfortunate habit of dropping in on me unannounced and jerking me back to the surface. Her affection for the girl who had saved her father and gratitude that he had recovered so abruptly from his awful state clouded the fact that she no longer served any purpose in the house. As long as Catherine was perched in her customary chair at Grandfather's side, my aunt wandered the halls like a healthy ghost. She took to the kitchens a few times a day, filling the void Nicolette had left, and during that time the yellow birds and lone rose were always well taken care of.

Catherine wisely retreated from my company for some time after the day she made me speak of the man who had once sheltered me. I heard the rustle of her feet behind me in my study sometimes, but I never deigned to turn around and confront her. I met no one's gaze during meals and my wife, occupied with her guests, no longer tried to force me to be cordial.

One afternoon as I was taking tea in my room, the fat little birds began flapping frantically about inside their covered cage. I kept my gaze on my cup, but a familiar pink hem swept into my vision and I had to lift my eyes to avoid the sight of those bare feet again.

"You never say anything to anyone, Monsieur Marius," she murmured. I remembered the rough, cracked voice she had had that first morning and wondered how she had managed to overcome it. "Won't you even address me?"

I surrendered and looked up her face, my eyes meeting hers for the first time in days. When had they become to clear and bright? She must have been scrubbing her skin mercilessly each morning, for her face was a blotchy red color now rather than the sun-damaged brown I had initially seen. Such an effect two weeks of food and clean bathwater had accomplished! I wondered if she could have been seen as pretty by someone who did not know her history.

"You're staring, Monsieur Marius," she pointed out. "Do you like what you see?"

I cleared my throat and looked away, my gaze coming to rest on the covered birdcage. It sounded like the stupid creatures were tearing each other apart in there.

"Just say one thing and I'll leave you be," she offered.

I swallowed, cleared my throat again, and drew in a deep breath, but no words came.

"Madame shouldn't leave you to yourself all the time. Anyone can see you aren't well. The more she leaves you to it, the further away you go. Do you even remember how to speak?"

"Of course I remember how to speak!" I snapped, but my voice, unaccustomed to use, betrayed me and cracked.

"You don't have to worry about me, Monsieur Marius," said Catherine. "I know you don't want to talk about what's happened to you. But you can't stop talking altogether. I would talk with you if you'd let me."

"Cosette has tried to change me and it hasn't worked. I daresay my own wife knows me better than some—some ragamuffin off the street!"

"She's gotten used to you, that's all. She's seen so much of this version of you that she forgot the student with fire in his heart that she meant to marry."

"I never had—"

"Nonsense, Luc-Esprit told me all about your phase as a republican. He told me that you stood right there in that room and told him Louis XVI is a great hog! He told me you printed up all those cards calling yourself a baron and didn't know who to give them to. That's the Marius you're meant to be."

I recognized the stories she told as if they had happened in one of my old books. "People change."

"You shouldn't have."

The ruckus of the birds' wings was eclipsed by a rattling sound: I looked down and saw that the teacup and saucer in my hands were beginning to shake. I all but dropped them onto the table and pushed myself to my feet, moving toward the birdcage without paying attention to my purpose. I pulled back the sheet and found them hurling themselves at the bars over and over again, their yellow feathers scattered across the bottom of the enclosure like a layer of dust. "These damned birds," I hissed. "I ought to buy a cat to rid me of their noise." Without replacing the cover or finishing my tea, I stormed out of the bedroom, leaving Catherine where she stood.

I followed the sound of my wife's laughter to find her taking tea with de Lotbinière in the parlor. I opened the door a little too forcefully and she whirled around in surprise, relief on her face when she saw that it was only her useless husband. "Are you disappointed in me, Cosette?" I demanded.

She faltered. "Am I—? But whatever do you mean?"

"Did you expect to be married to some passionate young fool of a schoolboy with no thought but of the betterment of all mankind? Is a miserable lawyer who refuses to leave his study less than what you'd hoped for?"

De Lotbinière coughed. "Ah, um, excuse me, Pontmercy, if you and your charming wife need a moment—"

"Forget it," I growled, and I turned away.

"Marius!"

I stopped.

Cosette pushed herself to her feet, taking a moment to regain her balance beneath her pregnant belly, and then came out into the hall with me, closing the door to the parlor so that we were alone. "What brought this on, Marius?" she asked tenderly.

I couldn't bring myself to look at her.

My wife sighed, putting a hand against my cheek and turning my head until our eyes met. "Will you come to Adélaïde's house for dinner tonight? I thought that if you would come out with me, Monsieur de Lotbinière could accompany Catherine. I think she's ready to be seen."

"I have to work," I replied automatically, but this time that wasn't enough.

With an anguished sigh, Cosette leaned forward on her tiptoes and pressed her forehead to mine, her eyes closed. "I do miss you, Marius," she whispered, her voice thick with unshed tears. "I wish you would come back to me." She released my cheek and found my hand, which she laid across her taut stomach. "Our family needs you."

"Cosette," I protested, trying to pull away.

She let go of me, her eyes wide with hurt, and took a step back. "You may dine with Catherine and your aunt this evening," she said, her voice shaking. "Monsieur de Lotbinière and I shall go to the Drouettes' for dinner. There's no need to leave a light on for me." She went back into the parlor and slammed the door behind her.

I knew that the correct thing to do would be to follow her, but somehow I couldn't. I put my palm against the door and spread my fingers across its surface, but I couldn't make myself open it again. After a long moment I gave in to my instinct and turned away.

I did not see Catherine in my room when I passed it, and was surprised to find that my grandfather was unchaperoned in his bed. Instead of lying beneath the blankets he was seated on the edge today, his slippers grazing the wooden floor as he stared intently at the wall.

"Grandfather?"

"She isn't just a woman, she's an angel," he mumbled.

I followed his gaze and saw that he was looking at a crucifix my aunt had put on display when he first appeared ill. "Cosette?"

"Mademoiselle Catherine, of course," he said impatiently. "But I called her an angel and she laughed at me, did you know that? She laughed and said she did not come from God. She said she was the devil himself!"

"Catherine said that to you?"

"But if she isn't from God, why would she bring back my life? She told me about the world, my son. She told me that it didn't stop, that it will never stop, and that I'm lucky to witness the changing nation for myself. She told me that a man whose tastes never strayed from side hoops would find great humor in the fashions of today. She told me that things will only keep changing, and that I should hang on to this world to see it happen. How could words such as these come from the devil?"

"I don't think she intended you to believe her words literally, Grandfather."

"She isn't a normal woman, that much is certain," he went on deafly. "If she isn't an angel, she must be an imp. A mischiefmaker, perhaps, but never a devil."

I helped him back into bed and left him to his disjointed musings, happy to close myself away in the study for the rest of the day. Each morning I had to choose from fewer and fewer unread volumes: I knew that soon I would be forced to buy new books if I hoped to continue to divert myself from my grim reality.

It was evening when I ventured out again. I heard soft snores from my grandfather's room as I passed it, and the stillness in the rest of the house indicated that Cosette and de Lotbinière had already left for her friend's dinner party. I wondered if Catherine had gone with them, or if she was going to suddenly appear before me like the unnatural creature she was. I realized that though Cosette and de Lotbinière had been out several times already that week, Catherine had never left the house in the fortnight she had spent with us. Neither had I, of course, but that was my own decision. I had nowhere to go.

Assuring myself that I was alone but for my aunt, who was probably down in the kitchen, I went to my room to clean up the tea that must still be sitting, cold and abandoned, after I had left Catherine's presence. I was surprised to find that it had already been cleared away and that the room was entirely neat, almost as if a maid had passed through. I couldn't imagine Cosette bending over to fetch the blanket I had left heaped at the base of the birdcage, so it must have been my aunt's work—or Catherine herself. Intrigued at how peaceful the birds were beneath their covering, I lifted a corner of the fabric and peered inside.

The birds were dead. Their little round bodies lay in the middle of the carpet of feathers they had shed in their unexplained distress that afternoon. Inwardly relieved, I unhooked the cage from its stand and tipped their corpses unceremoniously out the bedroom window. Perhaps some stray cat would be delighted to find a free meal unable to fly to safety. The little yellow bodies fell directly to the pavement, the extra feathers trailing behind them in a cloud that floated lazily away in the chilly breeze. I returned the cage and repositioned the blanket. Perhaps I would tell Cosette that they had flown to freedom.

I dined that evening with my aunt and Catherine, who had been tucked away somewhere in the house after all. The quality of the food had not much improved since my aunt had taken over Nicolette's duties. I noticed that Catherine ate now with a fork, her bites a little too big but her manners otherwise impeccable. She and my aunt were so busy discussing my grandfather's health that I had no need to join in. I looked at my wife's ward and thought about the nonsensical things my grandfather had been saying. As if the devil would disguise himself as a ragged urchin girl lying swaddled in rags, abandoned in an overgrown garden!

On the other hand, it was easy to see why he suspected that there was something supernatural about her: her transformation into a young lady progressed markedly each day, and with each bath her real features became a little less distorted by sorrow. I had held her in my arms that night in the garden, and had felt for myself that she was hardly more than a human skeleton encased in what might have once been a dress. Now, only two weeks later, she had already put on enough weight that her shoulders, once sharp angles beneath a stretched layer of tanned hide, looked round and soft. At the front of her borrowed pink dress I could see a hint of her breasts, fuller now than they had been the day I had been forced to undress her. The redness of her skin had worn off since the morning, leaving behind full cheeks and a delicate chin.

When Catherine turned and raised her eyebrows at me I realized I had been staring openly at her rather than eating. I quickly looked back down at my plate, forcing a piece of overcooked lamb into my mouth and cringing as I waited for her to speak.

There was a commotion followed by a frantic series of knocks at the front door, accompanied by someone shouting my name. I rose so quickly that I cracked my knees against the table, relieved to have been rescued from what might have evolved into yet another awkward moment between myself and that forward creature, this time with my old aunt as a witness.

A young man was at the door, his fine clothes slightly askew and his hat missing. As soon as he saw that I had answered he shouted his message into my face: "Baron Pontmercy! The baroness has gone into labor!"


	9. Wenn ich aufwach quält mich die Angst

The child was with us for a week before I heard it make a noise.

Cosette's pregnancy should have lasted at least another month. For the hardy son I had been promised, she had needed just one more month. Fate was unkind, and instead she delivered a weak little creature that I could hold with one hand.

Nicolette returned to us when the news reached her, and my aunt allowed Catherine to share her room so that de Lotbinière could vacate the nursery. Though his things were in the spare room, he passed his days at my wife's side, telling her fantastical tales of his travels in a low voice while she sat by the crib. He brought meals to her on a tray while the rest of us dined at the table.

Catherine kept her word and did not mention the past to me anymore. Now when I heard her enter my study I found myself closing my books and turning to face her. I let her chatter away about the difficulties of sharing a small space with my aunt or about my grandfather's progress. Four days after the child was born, Grandfather joined us at the table for lunch. He leaned heavily on Catherine, but once he was seated he delighted my aunt and our guests with boisterous conversation, just as he had done in the old days.

Two days later, I turned the final page of my last unread book. At dinner my aunt expressed a desire to get out of the house and I surprised everyone by offering to take her to any book seller she fancied. That night was the night I heard the child make a noise for the first time since Cosette had arrived home from her ill-fated dinner party. She was already asleep at my side, so I slipped carefully from the bed and ventured down to the nursery without stopping to shrug on my housecoat. The door was open, and inside I saw Catherine, her body thinly veiled by a borrowed shift, holding the child in her arms. She heard a floorboard creak beneath my weight and whirled around guiltily. "I just wanted to hold him!" she whispered, her eyes wide in the darkness.

I nodded, relieved that someone else was seeing to the sickly little thing, and went back to bed.

When I awoke in the morning Cosette was already gone. I dressed to leave the house for the first time in weeks—my waistcoat was a little looser than I remembered—and went down the hall to check on my family.

De Lotbinière was in his usual place on the day bed, reading a passage from one of my old books aloud. He halted mid-sentence when I came into the room. Cosette only glanced up from the cradle for a moment. "He's worse," she whispered, coaxing one finger into the child's limp hand. "Look how pale he is. The life is draining from our baby and there's nothing I can do."

Unsure how to comfort her, I shot a nervous look at de Lotbinière. "I shall watch over your lovely family, Pontmercy," he assured me. "I believe your esteemed aunt is waiting for you to take her somewhere."

I thanked him and hurried out of the room. At the far end of the hall, I found grandfather awake and sitting up. "I'm taking Aunt Gillenormand out to a book seller's today," I told him. "Do you want anything?"

"Get rid of that," he said bluntly, jabbing a finger at the wall of his room. "Mademoiselle Catherine doesn't like it, and neither do I."

I followed his gaze to the crucifix my aunt had left on the wall. Without another question, I took it down and stashed it in the wardrobe.

While we were waiting for Basque to bring the carriage around, my aunt asked how the child was doing.

"Worse," I replied, unable to think of a more elegant response. "Pale."

"Worse?" she repeated. "But I heard him cry out last night! Didn't he cry? I thought he was getting stronger."

I shook my head.

"You heard nothing?"

"Mademoiselle Catherine tended to the child last night."

"Oh, thank goodness! I saw she was no longer in her bed when the cries awoke me last night and I feared for her! I had to assure myself that she had gone to the kitchens in order to fall asleep again. She moves so quietly, the unnatural girl! I am grateful that she never wakes me. Basque!"

"Yes, madame?"

"I would so love to pass by the opera house, just to see it out my window. Could we go that way?"

"Yes, madame."

The carriage ride was long and tedious. I began by looking out at the city, but I kept imagining familiar faces amongst the pedestrians and finally had to turn my gaze down to my lap. My aunt, on the other hand, had all but pressed her nose to the carriage window. I remembered that this was her first chance to leave the house since my grandfather's illness had begun months ago.

When crowds of people in the narrow street brought our carriage to a halt, I looked out at our surroundings and immediately regretted it. I knew this place far too well: just ahead was the intersection where all my nightmares took place, the intersection where I had watched people die, where I had slipped on blood-soaked cobbles, where I had made peace with my life and waited for the end. I clenched my eyes but it was too late to forget. Their faces were appearing already, some of them clearer than they had ever been. I could hear their voices, their cries drowned out by gunfire. I smelled blood, human blood, mixed with the filth of soiled bodies and smoke, that particular kind of smoke that was expelled from cannons, from muskets, from carbines. I could hear a death rattle, a low voice, an upturned face and a bony hand clawing at my knee, and suddenly I remembered.

There had been a girl at the barricades. A girl had hidden her tangled hair beneath a workman's cap and had come to die with us. She had died at my feet. She had died with her head against my knee.

I had known her. It was my neighbor, a forward creature who might have been a pretty girl had she ever been taken care of properly. I remembered her sauntering into my tiny room and invading my silence with blithe chatter and long, unsettling stares.

Éponine was the girl's name. Éponine was the girl who had died at my feet.

It was Catherine.

The thought was impossible, but no other explanation came to me. Justification after justification crowded into my mind: those same fishy eyes. The long, lank hair. Her refusal to wear shoes. The broken way she hummed to herself. The low, guttural voice she had used when first she came to us. The scars all over her body.

Catherine was Éponine, but how could that be? I had watched her die. I had seen her limp body thrown onto the pile. I had seen her teeth covered in a red haze of blood as she smiled at me, that same awful smile that I now saw every day in my study.

But I understood now more than ever: it was Éponine who had first guided me to the garden in the Rue Plumet, the very garden where my wife and I had found Catherine. She had known about the loose bar in the gate. It was Éponine who croaked the name "Monsieur Marius" at me, the name Catherine had used since she first began to speak. I remembered watching from beneath my bed as she sneaked into my old room one day and studied her reflection in my looking glass. But how could she live again? She was dead, unquestionably dead.

Catherine was no ghost—that much was certain. My family had all interacted with her, and I had felt her solid lips against my cheek and her breath on my face. She ate our food and slept in our beds. Catherine was alive. Catherine was real.

I looked to my aunt as though she might offer some explanation, only to catch sight of the rosary she wore around her neck. At the sight of the cross, I remembered my grandfather's words a week ago about how unearthly our visitor was: he claimed she had called herself the devil. A short hour ago I had hidden his crucifix because Catherine didn't like it.

I opened my window and leaned out it. I had new directions for Basque.

My aunt covered her face with her handkerchief when I opened the door on her side of the carriage and helped her down to the street. She hurried into the store, stepping carefully to avoid dirtying the hem of her dress. This was not the neighborhood she had expected.

Once we were inside, she seemed unsure whether she should be more shocked by the dusty piles of books with broken bindings or the shelf of strange poultices in jars. A dark-skinned woman greeted us, eyeing my aunt as mistrustfully as my aunt was eyeing her. It wasn't until the shopkeeper offered my aunt a cup of tea that I saw her shoulders relax. The woman and I left Aunt Gillenormand in a dusty chair near the store window to sip from a chipped china cup so that I could speak of my revelation in privacy.

"Certainly Monsieur didn't come to this place just to drink my tea," the shopkeeper prodded, her voice thick with a Romanian accent. "You needn't hesitate. Ask."

I cleared my throat. "I- I saw a girl die nearly three years ago. There was no way for her to have survived. Yet last month..." I paused. It sounded even more unlikely when I said it aloud. "She is staying with us. She eats our food and has befriended each member of my family. I'm sure it's the same person. How can she be alive?"

"You have noticed something?"

"It's just-" I balked.

"Tell me," the woman insisted. "There are all manner of spirits and demons that walk among us. Does she recoil at the sight of salt?"

I shook my head, remembering the greedy way Catherine ate. "She seems to like it."

"Garlic, then?"

"I'm not sure. But she told my grandfather that she was the devil himself, and had him hide a crucifix that was on his wall."

The shopkeeper nodded, tapping her lip with one long finger. "Has anyone in your family fallen ill?" she asked at length.

"Quite the contrary. My grandfather was very ill until she began to spend time with him. The only illness in our house now is that of the child."

"And do you feel strange around her? Do you engage in unusual behavior? Do others suddenly have a loyalty toward her that doesn't make sense?"

"Well- yes," I realized. "Everyone adores her. And when I stand near her-" I broke off, unable to put the sensation to words. "I don't always feel responsible for my actions. I don't always feel in control of my will."

The woman nodded. "Wait here," she instructed, and she disappeared behind an uneven shelf. I checked over my shoulder; Aunt Gillenormand was sitting on the edge of the armchair as though she expected it to dirty her plain gray dress. She had just poured herself a second cup of tea and was drinking it with a quivering hand. I would have to take her for a walk through the park to settle her nerves after this, I realized.

The shopkeeper returned and pressed a heavy book into my hands. I started to reach for my coin purse but she shook her head. "It's yours," she said simply. "Protect yourself."

I brushed a thin layer of dust from the book's cover and read the word printed there: VAMPIRES.


	10. Lieg ich im Dunklen und warte

At first I left the book in the corner of my desk, unopened, and stared at it over steepled fingers. The bold print on the cover seemed like an accusation. A laugh filled my mind—that familiar, jaunty laugh that used to make my ears burn hot. The hairs on my arms stood up though I knew the sound had come from my imagination. I cleared my throat and sat up straight in my chair, rubbing my arms until they felt warm again. One resurrected specter from my past was more than enough for the time being.

Suddenly aware of a presence, I twisted violently in my seat, but Catherine had not come into the study. I shivered, turned the old book face down on the desk, and left the room. I certainly didn't believe in the creature that the book named, but in the slight chance that there was truth to the mad idea I wouldn't want my unearthly guest to know that I had caught on to her game.

On my way to dinner that night I passed de Lotbinière carrying a tray with two bowls of soup toward the nursery. "Ah, Pontmercy!" he greeted me. "This doesn't smell like your poor cook's best effort, I'm afraid." He jerked his chin toward the carefully-balanced tray.

"What is it?"

"Going by smell alone, I'd say garlic soup! That's the stereotype of us French when you're abroad, you know. The English especially can't stand the stuff, but they believe we lace every meal with it!"

I nodded, studying the offending soup to avoid his gaze. There were obviously chunks of something else floating in the broth—probably fish, knowing Nicolette—but if not for that I would have agreed with his appraisal.

Everyone had been served by the time I reached the table. My grandfather had elected to turn in early, but my aunt and Catherine were already seated, the former waiting for me politely while the latter greedily chewed at a piece of bread. My aunt's expression was still grim: she had not yet forgiven me for overriding her orders to Basque earlier. Though we had spent the afternoon at the Tuilleries, her cheeks were as pale as they had been when she had taken in the sight of that dusty old bookstore, and she continued to hold herself as though she expected to faint at any moment.

I tasted Nicolette's soup only to find that the smell was the most offensive aspect of it. Perhaps she had been a little overzealous with the garlic, but it was hardly worth noting. I watched my aunt take a dainty sip and could see written across her face how little appetite she had. She had not eaten to my knowledge since draining the teapot at the bookseller's, yet the idea of swallowing more than the tiniest spoonful of soup appeared to exhaust her. On the other side of the table, meanwhile, Catherine was finishing off a second hunk of bread. When my own appetite failed I could always count on my wife's visitor to take a second helping and validate Nicolette's efforts; I had no doubt that she could eat for my aunt as well.

I was chewing my second bite of the nondescript fish when Catherine all but ladled her first taste of the soup into her mouth—and to my shock, she dropped her jaw and let the liquid fall right back into the bowl.

My aunt's eyes widened, not out of shock but from concern: "Are you ill, my dear?"

Instead of answering, Catherine quickly drained her water glass and then reached for the pitcher to pour herself another.

"You don't like the soup?" my aunt pressed.

Catherine shook her head and she finished the second glass of water. "What is that?" she asked, wrinkling her nose.

"Fish?"

Catherine shook her head again. "As if I don't eat fish! Something in the water has a taste to it."

Now it was my eyes that widened, though the ladies did not notice. I participated so rarely in dinnertime conversation that they had slowly ceased even glancing in my direction. I wiped my mouth with my napkin and laid it on the table, rising from my place and bidding them an abrupt good night. My aunt was too busy cooing over Catherine's offended palate to even glance up as I took my leave.

I went directly to my study, closed the door firmly, and settled into my chair with the ragged old book. The first time I read it, I wanted to scoff and find the whole idea ridiculous, but there were too many details that made sense.

Since her arrival under this roof, Catherine had never failed to empty every plate set before her with ravenous hunger. She had never once voiced an opinion about any meal other than the action of asking for more helpings, but today, the day that Nicolette had prepared a garlic soup, she spit it out the moment it touched her tongue.

She had never left our house at all: the only time I had seen her near a sunlit window was that first morning when she had howled at me like a wild animal.

She had told my grandfather that she was sent by the devil and had had him hide his crucifix.

The book claimed that the undead creatures—vampires—feasted on human blood rather than solid food. I wondered if this explained her constant hunger. Yet she had been growing stronger as she stayed with us rather than weaker, so which of us was her victim?

I remembered the scene I had witnessed only last night: the baby had cried out loudly enough to wake me, and I had discovered him in Catherine's arms. The next morning he was silent and pale.

Almost as pale as my aunt, who had been weak all day! The book also claimed that vampires could use supernatural persuasion to charm mortals into obeying them, even worshiping them! That must be the reason that everyone in the house adored her so immediately upon her arrival.

I felt a lurch in my stomach when I realized that I was not immune from her spell either: didn't this creature who had once seemed like an elderly corpse now creep along the corners of my mind when I laid down to sleep at night, or when I caught myself daydreaming and gazing at nothing? Couldn't she fluster me and keep me rooted to a spot when every ounce of my instinct tried to tell me to run back to my wife?

I could think of no other explanation: the beggar girl who had once been my neighbor had been forced back into life after dying to save me, and she had lain in wait in the garden where my wife had once lived in order to take her revenge. Cosette had fallen into the ridiculous trap, taking her in and letting her slowly take over our home, our family, and turn us into nothing more than—than livestock!

I read the book three times through that night and eventually found myself waking in my study, still partially dressed, at some silent hour of the night. I closed the book and hid it under a pile of unanswered letters before turning to go back to my room and sleep the rest of the night in my bed. My eyes were still acclimating to the darkness when they picked out a familiar white shape perched on the back of the couch; I leapt backwards, tripped over my desk chair and falling back into it.

Catherine rose to her feet in a move so graceful it could only have been otherworldly. Had she seen the book? Did she know what I had learned? I tried to act as though nothing had happened that day, as though I was still ignorant to her identity. "Ah- Mademoiselle Catherine! You- you startled me," I whispered into the darkness.

"I come in here sometimes to read at night," she said unashamedly. "Your sweet old aunt snores. I was surprised to see you here, but I thought I'd wait and make sure you didn't have a nightmare."

"That's- that's very considerate of you. As you can see, I'm fine, so- so I'll just return to my room."

"You have had nightmares before, you know. Sometimes I'm in the hall and I hear you. You grunt and you moan. The first time I thought you were up to something else, but it didn't sound quite right."

I wondered if she could see my face burning in the darkness. "I really don't think it appropriate-" I began, but I realized she was slowly advancing on me, blocking my escape from the chair unless I dared knock her over. "Mademoiselle Catherine," I said again, my voice feeble.

"I promised not to talk about what happened to you ever again," she said, her voice low. "But I want to help you. There's one thing I can help you with." She placed a hand on my knee, the unexpected touch causing me to tighten my grip on the armrests. "I mean, if you want my help," she murmured with a sly smile. That hand slid up the length of my thigh, bringing up the hem of my shift with it.

"Mademoiselle-" I tried to say, but she shushed me and I had no choice but to obey. I sat still, frozen in that familiar trance as she dropped to her knees before me and, with a teasing look, slipped her other hand beneath my nightshirt and dragged her fingers up through the hair on my thigh—then higher, a slight brush of contact that brought a hiss of air out from between my teeth.

She grinned at me again. "You don't want me to stop, do you?" she asked. I had no choice but to shake my head. Her spell over me was absolute, and even if I had wanted to push her away—that is, of course I wanted to push her away—I could not. I had no choice but to watch helplessly as her entire head disappeared beneath the white fabric. I had no more control over the way my body responded to the foreign sensation of her mouth and her nimble fingers exploring my skin. I saw only her shrouded head moving back and forth for several sweetly torturous minutes before my grip on the armrests became even tighter and she coaxed me into a release the likes of which I hadn't experienced in months. When she reemerged she simply wiped her mouth on the sleeve of her own nightshirt, patted my cheek, and exited the room. I was left sprawled across my chair, sweat beading on my brow and upper lip, panting and trying to regain my equilibrium.

I spent the rest of the night on the couch in my study, unwilling to return to the bed I shared with Cosette though I knew that I had had no control over my compliance to the vampire's will. I fell asleep assuring myself that I hoped that the creature had exacted her revenge and would be gone in the morning.


	11. Die unwiderstehliche Versuchung

Through the weight of sleep I became aware that Courfeyrac was standing at the foot of the couch. His presence seemed natural, though I felt that he was trying to tell me something I couldn't hear. I sat up and forced my eyes open, blinking dimly at the shadowy study, but he was gone. I lay down again, but this time it was his familiar laugh that rolled through the edges of my thoughts.

_Pontmercy!_

Now when I sat up the fog had cleared away, and I knew I was alone in the room. The feeling that something significant had happened clung to me even now, but what had been real and what had been a dream?

His voice had sounded real. It had been solid enough to wake me more than once. I crushed the palms of my hands into my eyes until colors exploded behind my lids. No. It had to have been a dream.

When I removed my hands from my face, my vision crawled back from the darkness and again assured me that the study was empty. So why did I feel that someone was still standing there by the couch, watching me? I threw myself to my feet abruptly, but couldn't bring myself to go near the spot where I had seen him.

I started to leave the room, but my eye fell on my chair and the memory of what had happened last night broke over me, panic roaring in my ears. I gripped the back of the couch to steady myself only to hear that laugh again, clearer this time, followed by the unmistakable sound of my dead friend's voice.

_You're going mad, Pontmercy._

No!

I rushed to my room where I yanked on my trousers and forced my feet into my boots, almost forgetting to jam my hat onto my head as I hurried out of the house. There was no time to wake Basque; I ran to the end of the street and hailed a fiacre, surprised to find that I was breathless when I threw myself into the seat. I kept my eyes closed during the ride, as much to avoid the concerned glances of the driver as to hide from shadows of familiar faces in the streets.

When I arrived at the bookseller's, the door was standing open as though she was waiting for me, as though she knew that my problems with the supernatural had only just begun. I entered without knocking, calling out that I needed a book on spirits of the dead, but the crooked, dusty shelf she had shown me the day before had collapsed, scattering its contents onto the floor and blocking the rest of the aisle. I clambered over it anyway, my boots tearing soft pages from the old tomes, gripping at another shelf for balance only to bring its contents down as well. A cloud of dust filled the air around me, spurring me on toward the far wall of the store. When the dust cleared, I noticed a smell like rotten fish and a puddle of milky-clear liquid near the back of the aisle. I skirted it and rounded the corner, where I was met with the sight of the dead body of the bookseller. The entire floor was covered in more of the discharge, and the bookseller's corpse was right in the middle of it. Her skin was an unnatural shade of bluish gray, as though all the moisture had been drained from her body as she died.

This could only mean one thing: the vampire had found out about what she had told me and had punished her.

_And you'll be next, Pontmercy!_

I cried out and clapped my hands over my ears, though I knew nothing could stop a voice that was coming from inside my mind.

The fiacre was still waiting outside when I emerged, but I did not tell him about what I had seen in the shop. I clenched my eyes shut again as we returned home to the Marais, trying to erase the memory of those sunken eyes and wrinkled blue skin. What did she want from me? Hadn't last night been revenge enough?

I was relieved to find a handful of coins in my pocket to pay the driver when we arrived at the house, for I had not thought to bring my purse when I had charged into the street over an hour ago. Just as I was reaching for the front door, however, the knob swung out of my reach and I looked up to see Catherine standing before me, her arms crossed over that borrowed pink dress. The sight of her made my stomach drop; I took a hasty step away and would have fallen backward down the stairs had she not come forward and seized my arm. "Where the devil have you been, Monsieur Marius?" she demanded, concern in her tone.

I shook my head, unwilling to admit that I had seen what she had done to the bookseller, but Catherine no longer seemed to be waiting for an answer. She brought a hand up to her forehead, shielding her eyes from the dim morning light as she stared at me, her mouth dropping open. "Monsieur Marius!" she said again. "Look at yourself!"

For a moment I was afraid that some of the liquid from the bookseller's had stained my clothes and given me away, but when I looked down I realized that I was wearing my boots and trousers beneath an untucked nightshirt, and that instead of putting on a jacket as I left I had taken my housecoat. I was covered in dust, and my hat was gone.

"Marius?"

I peered into the dim hallway to see that Cosette was hovering just behind Catherine, who stepped aside and let me enter. My poor wife's face seemed so much more angular than I remembered, and her hair hung loose and limp around her shoulders. Forgetting myself and my transgressions for an instant, I pulled her into my arms, pressing my forehead to hers, but Cosette did not melt into my embrace as she had always done before.

Instead, she pulled free. "Marius, you're frightening me. Where on earth were you? Have you been gone all night?"

I shot a poisonous glance at Catherine, who simply shook her head and came back inside, closing the door firmly. I wondered if she meant for that simple move to appear so threatening.

"Come here," I murmured, taking Cosette's arms and leading her to the salon. I checked carefully to make sure that Catherine had not followed us and was not lurking just outside the door before I closed it and turned back to my anxious wife. "Cosette," I whispered, "we're in danger."

My wife seemed too exhausted to muster up much of a reaction. "Danger?"

"Cosette, Catherine isn't who you think she is. She's here because of me. It was my fault she died, and now she wants revenge."

"Died?" Cosette repeated, worry seeping into her expression. "Marius, what are you talking about?"

"Catherine isn't her real name."

"Of course it isn't!"

"Cosette," I said firmly, taking my wife by the shoulders and looking into her eyes. "The creature you call Catherine was a normal girl once. She died at my feet. Now she's come back, and she's after me. She killed that old bookseller for trying to help me, and she'll kill the rest of us next!"

"What old bookseller? Marius, please! You're really frightening me now!"

"I know it's hard to believe, but it's true! Everything I'm telling you is true!"

"Marius, please!" she said again, her voice coming out as a sob. She broke free of me, her blue eyes darting back and forth as she studied my face, and for a long, suspended moment neither of us said anything.

_Nicely done, Pontmercy._

I wheeled around, hoping to catch a glimpse of the spirit who continued to torment me, but he was not there. The laugh curled through my thoughts like distant thunder.

"Marius?" Cosette ventured.

I didn't turn back to face her. "Can you hear him?" I asked frantically, still searching the corners of the room with my eyes. I had seen him this morning, but only when I was half-asleep. What if he came back tonight?

The abrupt click of a door closing brought me back to the present, but when I spun around to face Cosette I saw that she had left me alone. I didn't know how to explain what I had learned to her without sounding like a madman, but perhaps it was better this way: after all, the bookseller had known the truth and now she was dead. Perhaps letting her leave in disbelief was a way of saving her life.

I went back to my study, locking the door firmly in the hopes that that would keep Catherine out, and returned to the couch. Perhaps if I went back to sleep here the spirit would be able to reach out again and tell me what it wanted from me.

It must have been late afternoon when I awoke again, though it seemed that no time had passed at all. Someone was banging on the door of my study, frantically shouting my name. I found the key in the pocket of my housecoat and, after a lot of clumsy fumbling, was able to let Basque in. "What is it?" I rasped, still groggy.

"Your son, monsieur," was his answer. His hat was in his hands. "I'm so sorry, monsieur."

Unsure what he meant, I drew my housecoat tighter and went toward the nursery, realizing as I walked that I was still wearing the trousers and boots I had put on to visit the bookseller's that morning. The doors to my aunt's and grandfather's rooms were standing open, and their beds were empty.

Most of the members of our strange household were gathered outside the nursery, a grim silence hanging over them. Only Nicolette looked at me as I approached, stepping aside so that I could see into the room.

Our doctor was bent over the cradle, and on the floor behind him my wife was slumped into the arms of de Lotbinière, her back shaking with silent sobs. I understood immediately and extracted myself from the crowd, not going to her side but into my bedroom. I pushed the armchair in front of the door to keep everyone out, but when I turned around, Catherine was already standing near the window, looking into the empty birdcage. I noticed that Cosette's rose was turned toward the light.

"You poor thing," Catherine murmured, studying me from her place on the other side of the room. "I know how it feels to lose a member of your family, you know. I had a little brother once, and a sister."

The story sounded familiar, but I couldn't clear my thoughts enough to think on it. "I know what you did," I said darkly. "I saw the bookseller."

"Poor Monsieur Marius!" she said again, her voice still sincere. "Was it that bad, then, last night? Was it really bad enough to drive you mad?"

I said nothing, simply glaring at her.

"I like your wife, you know," she said quietly. "I always did. I even wanted to go with her when she left. I'll never forget seeing her dressed all in rags with that enormous porcelain doll tucked under her arm. Have you ever seen a lady in a pink muslin gown embrace an urchin?"

I continued to stare, uncomprehending.

"My poor Monsieur Marius," she repeated. "What can I do?" She took a few steps toward me. "I want to help you, you know. That's all I wanted. Your wife was so busy and so upset that I thought you needed a distraction. I only wanted to help. Didn't you like it?"

The memory of last night rose again despite my efforts to avoid it. Again I saw the teasing look on her face as she disappeared beneath my nightshirt; again I saw her smirk as she re-emerged.

Now I could feel her spell wrapping around me again, more violent than ever. She must have realized that this was a perfect time: the entire family was sure to remain at the nursery and I had barricaded the door to my bedroom. Catherine caught her lower lip between her teeth and let her gaze travel down the length of my body, and suddenly I was glad to have my trousers covered by my nightshirt.

She did not need to take the first step: her power over me was so strong that it was I who suddenly closed the distance between us, who pulled her into my arms and kissed her hard, my basest instincts freed by her magic. I ground my erection against her waist and felt her draw in a sharp breath as we broke apart; she pushed my housecoat off of my shoulders and then lifted my nightshirt over my head, kissing my bare chest. I felt the long row of tiny buttons down the back of her gown and, impatient, left them and simply pushed her back onto my bed, hitching her skirt and petticoats up around her waist, pleased to find that she wasn't wearing pantalettes. I felt her hands deftly undoing the buttons of my trousers, which, already slightly too large, fell easily down to my calves. Unable to wait any longer, I drew her legs up around my hips and guided myself into her, only aware that I was pushing too hard when she gasped. I paused, mostly to be sure that we weren't making enough noise to attract attention away from the nursery, but when the laughter began again in my mind I thrust roughly into her, letting her low moan drown out the sound of his voice. It worked: I changed the angle of her hips slightly before I did it again, and was rewarded with an even louder reaction. She dragged one of my hands away from her waist and brought it to her mouth, closing her lips around one of my fingers and sucking hard on it the next time I tried to coax a noise out of her. The memory of what she had done last night came back so forcefully that my knees buckled a little, but I managed to withdraw my hand and lean in for another rough kiss, pushing so far inside her that our abdomens were pressed together. I held her there for a moment, both of us acclimating to the sensation, before I finally gave in to my urges and began thrusting roughly again, covering her mouth with my hand so that the only sound in the room was my own heavy breathing and the rhythmic slap of my skin against hers.

Finishing drained me now even more than it had last night: I slumped onto her, my sweaty forehead pressed to her sharp collarbone as I wait to regain my equilibrium. Her own steady breathing eventually set the pace for mine, and I collected myself enough to slip free and release her, pulling off my boots at last and carelessly using my trousers to clean myself, then throwing them into the corner. Her spell over me must have been spent, for I was able to push the chair aside and leave the room without looking back.

I started to go toward the nursery, but a strange sound from the spare room caught my attention. I pushed the door open and found my aunt hunched in a corner, vomiting into de Lotbinière's chamber pot. She was kneeling in a puddle of the same milky-clear liquid I had seen at the bookseller's.


	12. Worauf ich warte ist mir nicht klar

My aunt died two days after my child.

We were all told to avoid her room as she vomited herself into the grave. The doctor believed that she had contracted cholera, but only I knew that none of his precautions would have the power to protect the rest of my family from the vampire's wrath.

Cosette had slept in the empty nursery for almost a week, which allowed Catherine to sneak into my room at odd hours and compel me to perform acts I hadn't even dared dream about. Every time she slipped away I heard Courfeyrac's infectious laugh, tinged with malice now, and his voice whispering that I was damning myself to hell, that I was a fool, that the vampire was going to kill me last.

The voice of my dead friend was a constant presence, commenting on my every move, complaining that I did not deserve to be alive. It did not hurt my feelings for the simple reason that it was true: had Courfeyrac survived and I died in his place, he would have made much better use of life than I had. He would have been a better grandson, a better husband, and a better father. I did not indulge my guilt, however, for the blame fell largely onto the soft little shoulders of Catherine, and Courfeyrac and I both knew this.

I never saw Courfeyrac's face unless I was asleep, when he came to me without fail. Some nights he was my old flatmate, perching on the edge of my bed with an easy grin and some sort of embarrassing commentary about the women living under my roof; most nights he was a true ghost, part of his handsome face blown away by buckshot, fresh blood rolling across his fair skin, his hollow eyes poisoned with an accusation. I wasn't sure which vision I dreaded more.

It was the latter Courfeyrac who was with me on the night when I was awakened by a pair of lips pressed to my forehead and a whisper that broke around my name. I blinked until my dead friend was gone: in his place was the vision of a pale woman with gaunt features and long, limp hair. It wasn't until the last echo of my dream faded that I recognized the poor creature as my wife.

Cosette was seated on the edge of the bed in Courfeyrac's place, clad in a nightdress so ill-fitting that one of the shoulders had slipped partway down her arm, revealing a collarbone much sharper than I remembered. "Marius," she breathed again. I realized that her cheeks were streaked with tears.

Still unsure whether or not I was dreaming, I cleared my throat before I could answer. "I'm here."

"Oh!" she sighed, and with that she fell atop me, burying her face in my chest and sliding her arms beneath me in an awkward embrace. I said nothing else, unsure what to do other than cup the back of her head with one hand and let her weep. I don't know how long she went on until the muffled whimpers turned into long, strangled sobs: her anguished voice grew so loud that I held her head in my hands and pulled it away from my chest so that I could see for certain that she wasn't exaggerating. Without returning my stare she slid forward and pressed her face against my shoulder, her uneven breathing tickling across my neck as she tried to calm herself.

"Cosette?" I said at length.

"I'm losing everything," she whispered. "Please come back to me. I don't love Guillaume the way I loved you." She paused to kiss my neck. "Let me help you. We'll find a doctor; we'll leave Paris; we'll do whatever it takes to bring you back. I miss you. I read over the first letter you gave me each night before I fall asleep. My father, your aunt, our child—I could survive it all if I only had you."

I stroked clumsily at her hair, unsure what she wanted me to say.

Cosette pulled away and studied me at last, her face so close that I thought for a moment that she was going to lean in and kiss me. Even in the dim room I could see that she was watching me expectantly, waiting for an answer to a question I hadn't understood. Her mouth was trembling: she was expending so much energy on holding back a fresh wave of sobs that she was doing nothing to stop her tears from falling. It wasn't until one dripped on my face, making me flinch, that she said in a quavering voice, "Marius? Tell me what you need."

I looked at her unbelievingly, almost offended that she had forgotten all of my warnings. "I don't want you to die," I answered. "I want us to be safe."

"Oh, Marius!" Somehow this was too much for her, and she dropped her head back to the spot at my shoulder, her tears hot against my neck. "Do you still love me, then?"

I gently put my arms around her. Who would I be if I didn't love Cosette? But there were so many other important things to fill my thoughts now that we were under attack. I patted her back uncomfortably.

With a contented sigh Cosette sat up, wiped her face on her sleeve, and drew back the blankets to take her place in our bed. "Wait!" I hissed, flinging my arm out across the empty side of the mattress.

"What is it?"

I sat up, still blocking her half of the bed. "We can't make Catherine angry. She can't suspect that we're taking action against her."

No sooner had I said this than the light went out of Cosette's eyes. "Marius," she mumbled faintly, "please don't do this."

"It'll be alright," I reassured her. "We'll take care of Catherine first, then Courfeyrac's ghost. After that this will all be over. But we have to surprise her, so you can't be here when she comes in."

Cosette sat back, staring at me dumbly. "What did you say?" It was as if all of her unshed tears had dried and vanished in an instant.

"You can't be here when Catherine comes in," I repeated, forcing the blankets out of my wife's unmoving hand and pulling them back up to her cold pillow. "I'll go back to sleep for now. We'll let her believe that you're still against me, and in the morning we'll begin putting everything back the way it should be."

I settled back onto my side of the bed with my eyes closed, and after a long silence I heard Cosette leave the room as I had asked. For the first time in months, I fell asleep with a smile. Even Courfeyrac was silent until morning.

For the next several days Cosette avoided me completely, spending all her time locked away in the nursery, usually with only de Lotbinière for company. I couldn't tell if she was waiting for the opportunity to discuss our plan to be free, or if she was waiting for me to set things in motion while she kept herself safe.

The members of our household seemed adrift since they had taken my aunt's body away, wandering aimlessly through the halls and speaking in hushed tones. I had seen her as they were nailing the lid onto the coffin and recognized the same wrinkled blue skin and sunken eyes I had seen when I discovered the corpse of the old bookseller. I knew that it was the vampire's work, yet Catherine put on a show of mourning for my aunt, of withdrawing early in the evenings and even wearing a black band that she must have taken from my own wardrobe, which cinched in her voluminous pink sleeve and looked rather ridiculous. One evening I came into my study and was surprised to discover my grandfather installed at my desk and Catherine in her spot on the back of the couch, her cheeks wet with what could have easily passed for human tears. She fled the room as I entered it, which made my grandfather spring to his feet and swing his cane at me, advancing with surprising speed until I finally retreated and left him alone. Was this the same man who had been a breath away from death only a matter of months ago?

 _Perhaps your little vampire isn't all evil_ , Courfeyrac suggested. _What good does it do her to cure your grandfather?_

I shrugged. "She must be feeding off him," I said aloud.

I could feel Courfeyrac's disapproval. There were days when he hated Catherine as much as I did, but it seemed that this was one of the days when felt compelled to defend her.

"Now that the child has died and she killed Aunt Gillenormand, who else could it be?"

_But he isn't following the pattern that your son did. He isn't pale and weak._

"That's true," I ceded. "It's quite the opposite, isn't it? Why, he's as strong as she is!" And with those words we both saw the truth: he had become like her!

 _So now there are two of them,_ Courfeyrac observed darkly. _She turned him into a monster._

"I have to get everyone out of this house," I decided. "Cosette and I must find a way to start again. I'll never find a better woman than my wife. She's too good for me—you're the one who keeps telling me that—and I can't lose her to these creatures."

_Does the book say anything about exterminating them?_

"I'll check when Grandfather retires to his room. We'll make sure the innocent people are out of the way first, especially her, and then we'll do whatever must be done."

"Ah—Pontmercy?"

I whirled around to see de Lotbinière standing uncomfortably in the doorway. I noticed that despite the heat of the first days of summer, he was wearing two tightly-cinched waistcoats in contrasting floral patterns—I recognized the one on the bottom as one of mine. His dark brows were knit together in confusion as he searched the room to spot the person to whom I had been speaking. Courfeyrac chuckled, but I shushed him. He was always particularly petulant about de Lotbinière.

My guest took a step into the room, closing the door behind him. "Listen, old chap, I heard your poor old maid talking about leaving lest she contracts your aunt's cholera, and I thought it best to warn you that unless something is done you might have nothing on the table in a matter of days. Your grandfather is in a right state about losing her, and I feel sure that your Basque would follow and we'd all be out of luck."

"Let them go," I said with a dismissive wave. "It's not safe anymore. We're all getting out of here. You'll want to find other lodgings as well."

"I— what do you mean, Pontmercy?"

I shook my head.

"Look here, I came to you because I had no one else. My visit may have been extended beyond my original plans, but I assure you that I have done nothing but assist you and yours through these trying times."

"Can you be gone by morning? Cosette and I are going to sell this place, then buy a cottage in the countryside. Meaux, perhaps. I think I once knew someone from Meaux." The images were coming to me so quickly now: a little home like the one in which my father had died so many years ago; my wife in simple linen dresses; a real child this time, one who could survive to pluck the flowers from the garden and tuck them behind her ears—a little girl, and we would never dress her in pink.

"Pontmercy, I'm truly sorry, but I'm afraid I won't be going, and I have to ask you not to insist," de Lotbinière said firmly.

"You were always a guest here," I reminded him. "The visit has ended. You must get out."

"If I leave, who will care for Cosette?" he asked, his voice suddenly taking on an edge I had never heard before. "You? I doubt it! You're nothing but a lunatic!"

I balled my hands into fists. "I want you out by tomorrow," I said through gritted teeth. "Leave us to the lives we had before either of you arrived. Leave us to the marriage she expected when she left her father's care and came into my house."

"Ah, her father! She told me all about that!" he said with a bark of laughter. Something had changed about his entire demeanor: his motions were suddenly much more quick than usual and his words far sharper. "You began ruining her life far before we got here! That poor woman has never had such a stroke of luck in her whole life as to have met Guillaume de Lotbinière!" he hissed, spitting the name at me.

"Get out," I growled again, taking a step forward. "You'll leave tonight."

Suddenly de Lotbinière came at me like a flash of lightning. Before I even had time to react he had pinned me to the wall, and I felt warm steel against my throat. "Don't push me, Monsieur Marius," he snarled. "I've wanted to do you in since you lived at the Gorbeau house, and if it hadn't been for ol' 'Ponine I'd've done it long before you dragged her off and got her killed. You remember this next time you try to tell me what to do, understand?" He traced the flat side of the blade along my neck. "I've finished my share of bourgeois idiots and most of 'em I didn't know, I just fancied their wallets. But in this case—" his dark gaze flickered maliciously over my features, "—in this case I long to do it. For her. For Cosette. Because you deserve it."

He released me and, stunned, I had no time to remind my legs to support my weight. With a glimmer of steel the blade disappeared, but just as I thought I would sink to the floor he dragged me up again by the front of my nightshirt and delivered a blow to my face that knocked me entirely unconscious.


	13. Sich verliern heißt sich befrein

I don't remember regaining consciousness after the scoundrel de Lotbinière attacked me. When I open my eyes, I am in my empty study, night has fallen, and the book is open in my hand to a diagram: a drawing of the monster's body with a dotted line across the neck and an X over the heart. Didn't Nicolette use wooden stakes to support some of the herbs she grew on the kitchen windowsill?

When I open my eyes again, I am in my room. I feel as though I am finally awakening from a long, heavy sleep, the room swimming into its normal shape from a murky blackness. It is night. One wooden stake, its base still dark from the earth, lies conspicuously on my nightstand. The other is in my hand. Two vampires, two quick deaths, then the cottage in Meaux and the child with my wife's bright eyes and my dark hair. The little girl with flowers tucked behind her ears, Cosette reading to her before the fire—it will come when the vampires are gone.

_They're already dead,_ Courfeyrac reassures me, pressing a knife into my hand. _It's not murder if there's nothing left of the people they were._

Catherine is in the room, but I don't remember seeing her enter. She is in nothing but that borrowed shift again, pinned between me and the wall, her head thrown back and her hands laced behind my neck. She mustn't suspect, I tell myself. The words form again and again in my head, chanting in rhythm with the thrusts of my hips. She mustn't suspect. This is the last time. She mustn't suspect. It's over tonight.

I pull out of her and take off my nightshirt, using it to clean up. Catherine says something and I feel her arms wrap around my bare waist. My gaze is on the nightstand, on the stakes waiting to condemn her to the death she rejected, to avenge the infant and my marriage, my aunt and my grandfather and even that old bookseller. She turns around and her gaze follows mine. She is upset; she hurries out of the room.

_It's not murder if there's nothing left of the people they were,_ Courfeyrac says again. He is the specter today, one green eye and a skull smashed by buckshot, curls matted together with blood. His clothes are impeccable beneath the brown stains. His smile is the same as it always was, but his eye glints with malice rather than mischief. _Nothing left of the people they were, nothing but an echo clinging to you and trying to drag you to hell where they belong._

He is right. He is always right.

Catherine knows that I have the weapons. I can't wait any longer.

"For Cosette," I whisper as I take up a stake and the knife. "For Meaux."

The hall seems longer than I remembered, with more doors than I can identify. The first one I open is the nursery, where I see two shapes on the spare cot. One is a gaunt woman, her hands folded around a tiny white bonnet as she sleeps; the other is a man, an arm around his companion and his face hidden beneath unkempt black curls. I cannot find an explanation for this image—part of me believes that I have slipped back in time and am observing myself with Catherine as she was when she first came to us—so I close the door, quietly and firmly.

There is no one in the next room. I recognize an empty bed stripped of its linens. This is where my aunt died. There is something small and dark in the middle of the mattress. I approach cautiously, half-expecting it to be a rat, a familiar to one of the vampires, but recognize it at last as a fistful of wildflowers. The mat on the floor where Catherine usually sleeps is empty.

It is in the next room that I find one of the creatures, his thin, elderly frame stretched out atop the bed in a perfect recreation of human sleep. He does not move when I approach, his hollow eyes only blinking open for an instant before I drive the wooden stake into his heart. The look of horror and recognition drains away with the blood of his victims that coats the white sheets.

It is easy to slash through the throat at first, but the spinal column at the back of his neck requires a lot of unsteady hacking. If I leave the head attached to the body, the monster will rise again and all of this will have been pointless. When the head is severed, I leave it on the other pillow.

I am covered in innocents' blood. I reach down to wipe my hands clean on my nightshirt only to remember that I had discarded it in my room.

When I retrieve the second stake something happens, and I feel myself drift out of my own body. I see myself through Courfeyrac's eyes: a friendless boy who left his comfortable home behind to find truth, and I wonder how my life would have played out had I never seen that old man dead on the floor of his cottage and learned that he loved me. Could I have remained under this roof and inherited my grandfather's world? What would have become of Cosette had she never been cursed with a husband like me? Had I not been at that barricade, would any of them have died?

I watch myself wipe my hands on the crumpled nightshirt again, staining it red like the bedsheets in the old man's room, then drop it. _Just hold on till the end of the night,_ Courfeyrac insists. _We're only making it right._

I find Catherine asleep in the spare room. It was here that I first heard her speak, back when she looked like a wraith and had the hoarse voice of a nightmare. I know now that it had not been Nicolette's cooking, regular baths, and our easily-accessible pantry that brought so much life into the body of this intruder in a matter of months. I remember the way she had howled at the sight of me despite the open window, and the way the young gentleman in the street had stared accusingly up at this house. I wonder what became of that dandy, and where he had gone with the knowledge that an unearthly creature was loose on the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire. I envy him his normal existence, and for a wild instant I wish that he had thrown a lifeline through that open window on that chilly morning and pulled me to safety.

Catherine has thrown the blankets to the floor and is curled into a ball in the center of the mattress. I put one knee on the bed and try to push her onto her back, but without even opening her eyes she swats me away and mutters, "Not tonight, 'Parnasse."

I drop my weapons onto the mattress near her head and plant one hand onto each shoulder, forcing her to lie flat. Her gray eyes snap open in the darkness, surprised at my aggression, and I feel fear lurch in my stomach lest she retaliate. She blinks until her eyes adjust. The moment she recognizes me the fear drains away the way the life drained out of her foul creation less than an hour before. "Monsieur Marius," she says, memories of our indiscretions coloring her voice. "To what do I owe—" but one of her hands was tracing my body and comes to a warm, sticky smear of blood. She tries to get up, but now I am sitting over her, my thighs pinning her to her deathbed. "Whose blood is this, Monsieur Marius?" she asks, the wildness in her voice revealing her to be inhuman. She struggles vainly beneath me. "Monsieur Marius?"

I gather her frail wrists in one hand and crush them into the mattress. She begins to kick her legs into the air, but I bend forward and she cannot reach me. She strains, rocking side to side, but I won't be moved.

"Whose blood is that?" she asks again, panicked.

"You should know," I answer, my voice uneven. "They were your victims, after all."

"My- what do you mean? My victims?"

_She's trying so hard,_ Courfeyrac mutters. _Don't let her fool you._

"I won't," I promise. "It's too late."

Now Catherine is performing that trick again where she forces human tears out of her eyes. "Marius, please," she whispers. "We didn't want to hurt you. I just thought- it was my idea, I'm so sorry- we saw you two in the park and he called your wife beautiful and I had this idea, I thought we could be like you-" she breaks off. "Did you kill Montparnasse?"

Impatient, I seize the bleeding knife in my free hand and hold it to her throat.

"Is that his knife?" she sobs. "Oh God, Monsieur Marius, I'm so sorry! We wanted the money, that's all! We didn't know how far gone you were! Please, let me go! Let me go and I'll leave now, I won't take a single thing with me, just let me go! I'm not like them, I only thought of it because I was angry, because why should you have so much when you used to be just like us? You could have loved my sister and we would all be allowed into your world, that's all, and I thought 'Parnasse and I could join you, could be—"

"I'll never be a monster like you," I spit, pushing the knife against her throat until it pierces her flesh. Catherine's expression melts into one of terror and she screams, finally understanding that her spell over me is broken, that I won't be convinced to let her free.

The scream takes me by surprise: I force the knife into her throat, ending it much more quickly than I meant to. I hear a door slam open on the hall and realize that I will be discovered, that my time is limited.

My arms are drenched in blood as I saw at her neck, gracelessly hacking until I make it through to the ruined pillow. I reach for the stake, still holding her down though I know she can't fight back—not yet, not till her wounds heal—but my fingers are slippery and it rolls to the floor. I leap to my feet to retrieve it but it's too late; the door flies open to reveal my wife. She screams at the sight of me, then again at the vampire's blood-soaked remains; she backs away and slumps against the wall in the hallway, sliding down to the floor as she covers her mouth with both hands, screams crowding each other on their way out of her throat, choking on her own horror. I hadn't meant for her to see this part. It was going to be cleaned away when I came for her in the morning, ready to whisk her off to our cottage in Meaux.

Now de Lotbinière appears in the doorway, blocking my wife's view. I turn around, the stake in my hand again, and start toward the bed. I hear him shout, "Fuck! Azelma!" and then he has me by the wrist. He pins me to a bedpost and punches me across the jaw, shouting words I can't understand. He punches me again in the stomach and I can't help but double over as the air leaves my body. For a moment I think I will work my way free to finish the job, but he hits my face again and I see that the stake is no longer in my hand. I try to push him off but he rakes his fingers through my hair and drags me away from the bed. He begins slamming my head into the floor and the room is spinning, but I see Cosette's bare feet come into view and pull him away from me.

I am too weak and sore to push myself to my feet again. The stake, stained with my bloody handprint, lies tantalizingly close to the bed where the half-killed vampire waits for me to finish the job. I try to push myself up but my arms won't support me, and I collapse to the floor again. Behind the ringing in my ears I hear Cosette's voice in a relentless stream. I turn my head enough to see her in de Lotbinière's arms, and I cannot tell which is comforting the other. He kisses her forehead but the brightness is gone from his eyes. Neither of them is looking at the bed.

Gathering the last of my strength, I stretch out one bare arm until my fingers are brushing the wood of the stake. My touch makes it roll a little further, hopelessly far from me, and I give in to unconsciousness.

 

Courfeyrac is silent for the weeks leading up to my trial, and without him I don't know what to say. I try to explain to the prison guard about Meaux, about the vampire who won't die until the stake is finally plunged into her heart, but he won't look at me. In court, I see laughter and concern in equal measures. Cosette's face remains buried in de Lotbinière's shoulder, and though he stares coldly at me, his eyes are as dead as Catherine's were the night I cut off her head. When I try to tell them why I did it, I see only disbelief.

I don't know why I expected them to let me out. Even Courfeyrac left me in the end. I don't know how much time passed before a group of guards hauls me up off the stone floor and throws me into the back of a cart. Bleary, I ask where we are going only to be met with a sharp laugh and the words, "Meaux, where do you think?"

If Courfeyrac were here, he would be the voice that warns me not to believe them. Courfeyrac is dead. I have to believe in Meaux.

I am at the back of the cart, my shackled feet dangling above the road. A group of homeless children forms from somewhere and chase us through the street, chanting about the galleys and the guillotine. I lift my head to look at them, and suddenly I feel a hot spurt of fear flush through my veins.

A boy at the front of the little group has her fishy eyes. He smirks at me when I look at him, and I feel my stomach turn.

I try to get the attention of the driver, of my fellow prisoners, of anyone, but they won't heed me. Many of the prisoners are raving too loudly for my cries to even be heard, while others sit dejected like men already dead. I shout and shout about the creature who has sworn revenge, the creature I almost killed, the stake that rolled just beyond my reach—they don't listen. The urchin's face smears and I see her where he once stood, her pink dress bright in the midday sun.

She follows the cart all the way to the Place de la Concorde, laughing at my fruitless screams, before she disappears into the crowd and leaves me to my fate.


End file.
